Political science is the study of how we delegate power. That’s it. It’s just a way of figuring out the systems and tools we human beings have designed and used in order to decide who gets to have power and who does not.

First things first- what is power? Power in less complex (meaning less specialized, less stratified, more egalitarian and usually pastoral) societies is generally a matter of respect given to a Big Man (or Big Woman) known to be wise and just. This is the person who recommends how to divide up food stores to insure against famine and settles disputes between neighbors. They do not have coercive power, meaning they cannot enforce or police their suggestions. But their decisions are usually followed anyways.

In a more stratified society, power means coercive authority. It is who we decide has the ability to tell us what to do and to punish us when we don’t do it. This is why politics is a big fucking deal. It’s almost like choosing your parents, but you don’t get to move out when you’re 18 if they are douchebags.

There are different types of power structures, straight up democracies, republics, monarchies, dictatorships, oligarchies, etc. The major difference in these is how the elites are chosen. Are they elected? Do they rule through divine right? Through military force? (A note on elections, just because it has elections does not actually make it a democracy or a republic, more on that later). Legitimacy, or the the belief the people have in the rulers right to rule, is a key part of this process. If you are in a country that has been traditionally ruled by a monarch with divine right, it will take a revolutionary act to get people to believe that they could choose their own leaders instead of letting god and dna do it for them. A leader who takes power without legitimacy is going to have a boatload of trouble keeping it. This is why secret police exist. Or George Bush’s Free Speech Zones.

For a system to be considered democratic (or republican, the more complex sibling of direct democracy) requires several things: free and fair elections, a choice of more than one party, and wikipedia says equal access to power. Than last one is a load of shit though. I mean we’ve been a democratic country for how many centuries now and no one that looks at the members of our government would think there is equal access to power for anyone who isn’t a white dude. You can be in a country that looks like a democracy, what with the voting and all, but if you only have one party to choose from or if your are going to get beaten to a pulp for not voting the right way or if you cannot be sure that your vote will be counted or that the ballot box has been stuffed, then you’re not living in a democracy.

So what does this have to do with our little red, white and blue republic? Let’s go back to legitimacy. We have exactly one option for exerting coercive force back on our little band of elites, voting. That’s it. Sure you can write letters, give money, throw public tantrums on the internet that may influence power, but the elites are not required by law to follow any of that. They are only required to abide by who the voters say gets to be there (or who the Supreme Court says gets to be there).

Nowhere in the constitution does it say anything about 2 parties. Nothing in the idea of democracy says there has to be only 2 parties, and as a matter of fact, most democracies have 3 or more. The only reason we have only 2 major parties comes from legitimacy. We do not give other parties legitimacy because we refuse to vote for them. Period. Third parties don’t win because we don’t vote for them. And that won’t change until we start to vote for them.

(you should at this point be able to see the circular logic we employ en masse on that- third parties don’t win so I won’t vote for one so third parties don’t win ad nauseum)

But we’re supposed to have 2 parties that represent the two polar views on governance and government happens somewhere in the middle of those two sides? Right? Uhm no.

The elites have one pretty fucking handy trick that gets overlooked. The elites decide what the topics of government are going to be. We don’t have a national referendum or initiative system. The only power we have is in who we choose to vote for . I can’t say this enough times. The only power we have is who we choose to vote for. We don’t get to decide what the most pressing issues are. We have no say in what bills get brought to congressional vote. We have no say in what orders the president signs or vetos. The only power we have is in choosing someone who will (we hope) bring up issues that mean something to us.

Political parties are not like sports teams. There is very little luck involved, first off, and when your party is having a crap year continuing to support them actually makes the problem worse. The only thing that changes political parties is who is voting for them. Political parties get to decide what the conversation is going to be, but we get to decide if they even get to talk in the first place.

Lemme give you a pretty concrete example of how parties (and their extensions) get to set the conversation. Blue Lyon got her blogger blog shut down during the primaries because she wasn’t full of unity pony sparkle. (Somewhere there is still a backup word press blog for this one should I ever get booted). Most of the contributers at Corrente have been kicked off the big access blogs at one point or another for questioning the Dems seemingly drastic shift in platform to a much more conservative track. And these are Dems. They didn’t vote for McCain. Never had the intention of voting for a Republican. But because they aren’t sticking to the dominant theme of “If the Dems do it, it’s for a a good reason but look over there, there’s a rethuglikan sex scandal” Anyone not sticking to the dominant political themes gets silenced. Not by police, but by other citizens.

If you love the Democratic party, but are disturbed by the rightward route it is taking, there is only one action you can take to change that. One. Don’t vote for the party until it moves in a direction to your liking.

Look, I’ve said about a gazillion times that the elites never do anything against their own self interest. Progressive action is against their own interest. It cuts directly into their pocketbooks (for both the corporate thieves and their underlings, politicians). The Democratic party will not act progressive unless it is threatened with a serious power loss. They have to be scared of another party taking their place. For generations, Dems have been able to rely on women and minorities to vote for them without hesitation because the only other viable option is so much worse for them. Because we are such reliable voting blocks, the party has no interest and no reason to cater to us. Period. We have been there and have always been there and will always be there because, what are we going to vote for a Republican? (How many times have we heard that tired refrain? Cause I’ve gotten it more than a dozen times in the last week).

But Republican is not the only option.

What I am, what you need to be if you are really committed to progress, is willing to lose in the short term for long term gain. Yes, that means we may end up with more rethuglikans in office until the dems come back to progress or until a third party (like say the Green party) becomes powerful enough to win.

But neither of those things are going to happen if we keep voting for dems as they are. And political infrastructures do not spring up overnight, but are grown through the blood, sweat and tears and most importantly VOTES of its members. If you want a more progressive political state, you have to vote for one.

You can’t wait for a legacy party to change. It’s not in their interest to do so as long as you are still willing to vote for them. They got what they want from you, and it didn’t cost them a damn thing. Obama (quoting Ghandi) said “Be the change you want to see in the world”. So be the change. Go vote your conscious. Vote your values. Vote in your own best interest. And chances are that your conscious, values, and best interest don’t lie with either the Republicans or the Democrats, but somewhere else.

I wrote once long ago about how the Civil War was not really fought for the noble ideal of ending slavery, but because slavery was anathema to capitalism because it does not give the elites the same measure of pressure to control costs such as labor.

In the last week or so there have been lots of outcries about the rise of unpaid internships. It’s not surprising that when allowed to, businesses will stoop to not actually paying people for their work. These are the same members of society that brought us child labor, sweatshops, and the romantic lifestyle of the migrant farm workers, after all. The only difference is that unpaid interns tend to come from white, educated, middle class backgrounds. OMG we can’t exploit the young white people! That’s criminal.

But it was always going to come to this.

First, let’s start with some basics. Economists (some, most even) and Libertarians will tell you that the job market is a market just like any other and there should be no restrictions on it because restrictions interfere with competition and the invisible hand. Employees and employers are considered equal in their negotiations.

If you don’t like your job, you can find another job.

But anyone who has ever worked knows that’s not how it really works.

Despite whatever its mission statement might say, all businesses have one, single, solitary function. To make profit.

First you have to sell something. You have to make something that people want to buy, you have to price it at a price people will pay, and your costs for making a thing have to be less than the price people will buy it at. You will probably have investors, or even stockholders who have put up their own money for your business in exchange for getting a piece of the profit.

Now this might all be fine if there wasn’t massive constant pressure to increase profit. The shareholders want a bigger return on their investment, the CEO wants a bigger bonus payout. That screaming man on that money show will insult your company if it’s not growing profit margins enough

So things must be done. Companies are always looking for ways to maximize sales and minimize costs

And negotiations between employee and employer end up looking more like this

And since companies compete with each other, not just for customers but for stockholders, all companies eventually end up in the evil labor eating blob phase, unless there is another force at work to keep all companies from becoming sweatshops.

But unions only work if companies can’t do seedy shit to stop them. For that we need yet another external force

Government can do things like set minimum wages, create 40 hour weeks, mandate overtime pay and work safety standards. But they don’t do any of this unless they have pressure put on them, by say a large group of organized individuals who have people who can lobby for them. Like a union. Government can also set rules for the establishment of unions and make it so that companies can’t go around breaking the legs of striking workers.

But……..

So with neither the government nor unions working to keep companies from doing everything they can to screw the workers to maximize profit, unpaid interns are inevitable. You can’t go lower than zero on labor costs. Well yes you could. If companies start thinking that they would like to take a chunk out of the expensive college ed market by telling prospective students “You don’t need to go to that fancy school for 4 years, come do an apprenticeship here. We’ll only charge you half the tuition the university will, plus we’ll throw in valuable on-the-job experience. Can your uni offer you that?”

(Shit, should not have typed that. Somewhere there is a CEO coming up with fee-based apprenticeships right now)

One of the fundamental principles of economics is this: People are rational actors.

What that means is that we all are always using what information we have to act in our own best interests. And that’s true. Rush Limbagh shouts the douchebaggery from the rooftops because he is paid enormous amounts of money to do so. People put off going to the dentist because it costs enormous amounts to do so. People work at crappy jobs they hate because otherwise they would live in the park. We choose food and shelter over medicine because we may be able to skip a few days of our drugs, but skipping a few days of food costs more right now.

Here’s where it gets progressive: ALL people, regardless of race or income or social status, ALL people are rational actors. Poor teenage girls getting pregnant and becoming mothers, not actually an irrational choice if you have their information and life experience. Their own mothers are likely to die younger and are more likely to offer support to a young pregnant daughter than an older one. Also motherhood is a reasonable excuse to skip out on the more dangerous actions available to youths. It’s not uncommon for a teenage mom to say that becoming a mother “saved her”. Because of poverty, their prospects for college and high paying jobs are diminished, it doesn’t make much difference if you’re looking at a life of $8 an hour retail jobs if you have a child now or later career-wise, but now you have a mom who is both sympathetic and alive. 10 years from now you might not. That’s pretty rational.

LBGT- rational actors. Considering all the pressure, including threats and acts of violence, family ostracism, social ostracism, etc. if they could be another way, many probably would. And many try, if they didn’t then there wouldn’t be programs to pray the gay away. So coming out (or not coming out) is a rational act. Coming out means that the costs of a life in the closet are higher than the costs of a life lived openly. Reverse that for staying in the closet.

Even drug addiction can be looked at as a rational choice (I know, I know). To the person with the addiction, whatever internal pain has driven them to drug use is a more pressing matter than the fact that they are ruining their lives and destroying their bodies.

Teabaggers fighting on the wrong side of the healthcare debate- not actually an irrational decision (I know, I know). They are middle class white men for the most part. They are seeing their little sliver of advantage (the cough synonym for privilege in economics) stripped away through anti-sexist and anti-racist measures. They are seeing competition increase for resources they used to fully enjoy, and they have never developed the skills to compete fairly. They are not wrong that they are going to be losing something in this fight, but the information they don’t have (and that neither major party is willing to give them) is that they will make gains too. Take the five biggest issues in the life of a married, middle class parent: 1) healthcare, 2) retirement money 3) paying for the kids’ educations 4) job security 5) housing. All of these things have viable, universal solutions with progressives, but these men’s experience is someone always has to come out on bottom, and after centuries of unearned privilege, they are terrified that they are going to be the ones to take the fall. In essence, they are afraid we are going to do to them what they have done to us. Not an irrational belief.

I use this principle of people as rational actors to judge information I receive (ha! that’s meta). This is why I get down on the virtuous foodies and the meddling middling middles so much. Both of these groups (and there is massive overlap between them) believes or acts as if only certain types of people are rational. People like them, who only eat organic and did everything “right” by going to college and waiting to have children until they were financially established and married and getting all the preventative medical and dental care available to them. They cannot get out of their own privilege bubble long enough to see that poor people are acting rationally, based on what is available to them. And that is utter fucking bullshit.

I also use this principle to do a little extra work and figure out why someone might act in the polar opposite way that I would (see teabagger description). It also means that I give people credit for figuring out their own lives, and I don’t make excuses for the bad behavior of those who govern us. If they are misusing their power (anti-abortion executive order, thankyouverymuch) it is because it is in their own best interest. And since their job is to act in OUR best interest, it is a purely rational act for us to not let them keep their jobs when they fail at it.

There’s one more reason to believe in the all people are rational actors principle. If you think otherwise, if you think people are irrational or even that some people are irrational, then you can’t believe in democracy. The only solution in an irrational society is some form of totalitarianism, a single person or group or class or even trade group (health insurance parasites)having all the power over the the irrational hordes. And you need to hope that person’s (or group’s) self interest benefits yours. Otherwise you are just another dissenter, another irrational miscreant, who can’t see the hope and change and promise of the the big man in charge.

First- are you all enjoying the quick and dirty primers? I’m not getting a ton of comments on them but I do like writing them.

Feedback peeps, Mama needs feedback.

I threw a link up in reader from Corrente, but I wanted to link to the original post so that I can give you the rundown on copyright. Go read the original, then come back.

First things first:

There is no such thing as original thought.

What, you’re saying. That’s a load of whooey. Of course there is original thought. How would we have scientific breakthroughs or beautiful art if it weren’t for original thinkers?

No person comes from nowhere. We are not found fully grown with all our thoughts and ideas developed after a childhood spent under a rock. We are social creatures. We are learning creatures. We require information from other humans from the second we enter the world, and before that we require more than just information. No one thinks in a bubble, safe from the influences of the world. Actually, feral children are less able to think and communicate ideas, that is how important other people are to our existence as humans.

We build on the ideas and solutions of others. We may take an idea a step further than it’s been taken in the past, or discard it entirely, but that is always because information has come from somewhere outside ourselves and we have managed to piece together a new way of seeing things.

Lemme give you an example, Einstein would never have been able to come up with E=MC2 if it hadn’t been for Emilie du Chatelet, Volatire’s girlfriend and the person who proved how to measure work 200 years before Einstein started having thought experiments. Einstein is thought of, by the general population, as one of the most original thinkers in history, but he couldn’t be that if it weren’t for the thinking of other people before him.

So no thought comes from nowhere. Ever.

That said, we still want credit for our ideas. But credit is different than ownership.

When I was in college I had a poly sci proff who was really good at lecturing on the basics, idealism, realism blah blah blah. But he didn’t really have a solid grasp of some other philosophies, namely progressive ideas. So when I heard him using my exact wording, my exact framing, my exact phrasing while giving a lecture on structuralism, I knew he got his knowledge from one of my papers.

There were several suggestions given to me by other people:
1) Complain to his boss
2) Ask him for a TA job if he was going to use me to teach anyways

Neither of these sat well with me. I was comfortable with him, and didn’t have a problem taking credit. But the ideas in my paper weren’t mine to begin with, they were just explanations, definitions of something that already existed. He wasn’t making a profit off my ideas and he obviously learned something about a theory he didn’t know much about.

In the end I got him to write me a damn fine letter of recommendation instead. It includes the phrase “most promising student I have ever had the honor to teach”. That worked for me. I just wanted credit for giving him a view he hadn’t had before.

Now think about those comedians. They are using the same kind of informal system to get credit for their work.

Copyright law negates that. It removes the ability to further an idea because it becomes to costly to work with ownership of the original idea. So instead of giving non-monetary credit to past idea holders by 1) acknowledging it and 2) using their past work to build on, you have to come up with a completely different idea (based not on anything original, but on things that aren’t copyright protected).

Here’s an example of how not having copyrights actually expands business and creativity- fashion! (Weeeeeeeeee)

You can’t copyright a piece of clothing. If you could, there would be only one maker of jackets in this country. Or purses. Or shoes. All jeans would be Levis.

Since you can’t copyright it, fashion can fill damn near every niche, from price to style (though they are still scared of making clothes for the fatties- I blame that on the severe malnutrition they must be suffering from). You can buy a $5 tshirt, or a $100 tshirt. You can get jeans for $18 at Walmart, or special raw denim designer jeans for $200.

But there is a stigma to straight up copying another designer. You ain’t gonna get your knock off bags featured in Vogue. It’s a trade off. Do you want to try for elite status and very likely fail. Lots of designers do. Or do you want to make something more likely to sell but at a much reduced price? Lots of designers do that too.

Fashion is the giant industry that it is not because everyone wears clothes, but because there are few restraints on the creative side of the process. You want cheaper drugs, greener products, better music on the radio- remove the constraints on the creative side (i/e copyright) but keep or improve restraints on the safety and or labor side (no sweatshops, fair wages, must not kill people using it or working with it).

Free marketeers will be crying when reading that passage. But but but…. You can see their bottom lips go into the pouty thing. It’s funny that people who want absolutely no safety or labor restraints want to restrain people from improving on ideas. They want to compete for the worst possible positions, but get nauseous thinking that someone might outthink them.

Copyright stifles progress. It limits expansion. It keeps us stuck. There are ways of crediting past ideas without stifling future ones, and they have nothing to do with the current law. But those ways would severely undermine those who already have power. Remember, with very few exceptions (coughMetalicacough) it is the record companies and not the musicians who throw fits over file sharing. That ought to tell you something about who copyright laws actually benefit.

Wonder has brought to my attention that economics is a concept that a lot of people are afraid of, even smart well informed people. I think this might have something to do with the idea that economics is supposed to involve the scary MATH. But in reality, economic theory uses very little math. Specifics use math, but theory, no.

So i told Wonder and the Kid that I’d teach them a few things about economics. I am not an economist, but I know some stuff and maybe some of you all would like to see silly little sharpie drawn graphs explaining economics.
So first we are going to start with a basic macro system. It’s made up of 3 parts, the people, business, and government and it looks a bit like a triangle.

Stuff flows into and out of each part. People give their labor to business in exchange for wages and their money (wages) to business in exchange for goods and services. People and business give their money to the government in the form of taxes in exchange for services.

So when economists or other “learned” men talk about the inevitability of economic things, like how a free market will regulate itself, they are lying. Free markets are not like water, they do not find their own level through physics or gravity or some natural force. They are created by people and do not exist without people and will only be as “good” as the people who create them.

While I’m on the subject of “good” let me take a quick detour. Business has no morality, it is neither good nor bad. It is amoral. Its single focus is on making a profit. That these profits often come at the expense of people is not business’ concern and we should stop being shocked when companies poison toothpaste or dog food with cheap fillers. Of course business will choose cheap over safe. Safe does not increase profits.

That is why we have both government and business. Government’s job is to protect the people. That is the sole reason for it’s existence.

But………..

In our system, government and business are trading partners (and I massively simplified the drawing). Business not only pays taxes, but pays lobbies and makes campaign donations all in an attempt to pay less taxes and receive more services or keep profit margins wide by keeping labor costs low. And it also wants to siphon off the money that we people pay into the government by providing services that the government normally handles, like military contracting instead of soldiers or charter schools instead of public schools or health insurance instead of health care.

And government isn’t the reticent dance partner in this. Because neither business nor government exist without the will of the people, both parts actively work to control the people in order to gain or maintain legitimacy. A key element of this is the election process and two party system. Without business money to fuel elections, politicians don’t get elected. And you can’t get business backing if you are a progressive because you are a direct threat to the business/government legitimacy pipeline.

So basically this is what the triangle looks like now

This is why neither the public option nor medicare for all had any sort of a chance in the healthcare debate. They remove legitimacy from business by explicitly comparing the efficiency of a non-profit government protection system to a for-profit business service.

But remember, neither of these things are real, but we are. We are what gives them power and we can change that. But first we have to know how the current system works

First- there is the real economy. You go to work in this economy, you get a paycheck, you buy your groceries, put gas in your car, buy shoes for the kids in this economy. This is where real goods and services are exchanged.

Then there is the other economy, the one of wall street and banks and insurance companies. This economy doesn’t produce anything. No actual good or service is made or traded. It is the speculation economy. It is Vegas, but in way more expensive suits. It is all, entirely and completely, gambling.

And every dollar that goes into the speculation economy is a dollar that ain’t buying groceries.

But it’s worse than just being a resource sucking drain on those of us who live in the real world.

Imagine, if you will, that the book makers in Vegas, while setting the odds for the Super Bowl, were capable of changing the outcome of the real, actual game. Not by illegally fixing the game, but by legally changing the odds. This is what the speculation economy does. Insurance companies do this by constantly changing what it they cover, who they cover, how much they cover, this is hedging their bets. Mortgage companies do it with rate changes and slice and dice mortgage backed securities. Economists call this “interest in exchange for risk assumption” but as we all know, banksters don’t take any risks. They hava government bailouts. Wall Street is at least slightly more upfront about its gambling habits, but companies that treat their workers well don’t make nearly the same gains on Wall Street that companies that shit on their workers do (see the difference between Costco and Wall Mart for a very very clear example). This is called “minimizing overhead to increase profit”, and Wall Street loves some minimized overhead.

Maybe some of you all remember the go go 90’s. I do, I was middle class. And every time a new, historically low unemployment number came out, the stock market fell. Yeppers. Gains in the real economy make the speculators pee their pants in fear. Now, every time one more thing gets between us real folks and say health care reform, health insurance and pharm stocks rise. Because the speculation economy needs every dollar it can suck out of our sick, tired hands.

The speculation economy produces NOTHING.

And I think we should put an end to it.