cspam book club II -- edification via obsolete mediums

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SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

old thread was archived https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3817212 no one posted in it probably because it took too much effort to keep up with everyone else

we won't try to arrange weekly readings or anything like that. just post about good books here. excerpts are great!

I'll be mostly posting about nonfiction stuff. the last few books I went through are Matt Taibbi's The Divide, Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, Chris Hayes's Twilight of the Elites, and Michael Lewis's The Big Short

# ¿ Dec 20, 2017 20:38

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SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

The Divide is basically a long-rear end lesson where the moral is "do absolutely everything in your power to not be poor". but this post will be about what happens to noncitizens when they're detected by the system and bodily thrown out of the country -- that is, the sort of thing that Trump and Sessions have amplified to 10x what it was under Obama, and riled 62 million people up into arms about these evil dastardly nonwhite immigrants

Matt Taibbi -- The Divide posted:

The number of stories like this boggles the mind. Three hundred ninety-six thousand, nine hundred and six people were deported from the United States in 2011.

Of those, just over a thousand (1,119) had records for homicide, and just under six thousand (5,848) had convictions for sexual offenses. Roughly 80,000 more had other, lesser convictions for offenses like DUIs.

The overwhelming remainder were like Ella, people guilty of little civil infractions, what immigration authorities term Level 3 offenses: traffic violations, immigration violations, and so on. In some communities, like Georgia�s Cobb County, 60 percent of all detainees were caught for traffic violations. Many of those people were deported through rule 287(g), which is only supposed to target immigrants who are a �threat to public safety� and a �danger to the community.� The rule was supposed to make it easier to deport Mexican murderers, but the distinction got lost in the wash. Instead, the people we�re deporting are the ones who fled from Mexican murderers.

�Obama has broken all the deportation records,� says Nieblas. �One million people in just a few years. Incredible.�

Meanwhile, not one single employee of any foreign bank�not one banker from Barclays, Deutsche Bank, RBS, Dexia, Soci�t� G�n�rale, or any of the other numerous foreign banks that have been caught up in the many serious fraud and manipulation scandals in recent years�has yet been deported or jailed for any crime connected to the 2008 financial crisis.

So we�ve built a massive and ruthless police apparatus for the ordinary immigrant population, complete with a sprawling, essentially extralegal detention complex, to catch and detain people who have not committed any actual crimes.

This gigantic, menacing complex of bars, chains, buses, and airplanes built to deal with the immigrant poor stands in stark contrast to the tiny, disorganized confederation of perhaps a few hundred lawyers policing transnational financial companies. We don�t have special jails for foreigners or executives from foreign firms who steal by the million or billion.

So hundreds of thousands of people go to jail without committing crimes. Thousands or tens of thousands more commit extremely serious crimes, and no jail even exists to detain them.

There�s a profound story here about what�s happening to the very idea of citizenship, be it individual or corporate, in the new global economy. It used to be that citizenship in a strong and healthy state was universally prized, because citizenship confers rights. But with citizenship also comes responsibilities, and it turns out that not everybody wants those. In the minds of some, if you can get the rights without the responsibilities, you�re really onto something.

In other words, there�s a new class of people whose goal is to become above citizenship. Live in America, conduct your trades in the weaker regulatory arena in London, pay your taxes in Antigua or the Isle of Man. Keep the rights but offshore the responsibilities.

The flip side is that there is a growing subset of people, like undocumented immigrants, who live below the level of full citizenship. If the first group is stateless by choice, these people are involuntarily stateless and have virtually no rights at all.

For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth, we�ve developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship. And the one condition, it turns out, is money. If you have a lot of it, the legal road you get to travel is well lit and beautifully maintained. If you don�t, it�s a dark alley and most Americans would be shocked to find out what�s at the end of it.

and what happens to people who are deported? here's the story of Alvaro, a successful business owner who got deported for the crime of being mexican:

Matt Taibbi -- The Divide posted:

Once upon a time, most of the hardest labor in the chicken plants was done by black workers, and back then the area the workers lived in was called Niggertown. Then, after the Vietnam War, the town ghetto gained a Southeast Asian flavor with an influx of refugees, and the plants were suddenly manned by Vietnamese.

Arturo Corso, who in the 1990s worked as an assistant district attorney here, recalls a famous tale about white Gainesville�s relationship to the Vietnamese community. In 1985 the town brought murder charges against Nguyen Ngoc Tieu, a twenty-seven-year-old Vietnamese man who had allegedly stabbed a white woman named Debbie Rollins.

�This was way before my time,� says Corso. �The trial starts, and one witness after the other gets up on the stand and points at the defendant. They�re saying, �Yes, that�s him, he did this, he did that.� And every time they testify that he did something, the guy just sits there and says, �Not me, not me!� �

Corso pauses and shakes his head.

�A whole day of the trial goes by like this,� he says. �The second day begins and it�s the same thing�every time the witness points at the defendant, he keeps saying, �Not me, not me!� And everyone thinks what he means is �I didn�t do it.�

�They were almost done with the second day of the trial before they figured out that what he really meant was, he wasn�t Nguyen Ngoc Tieu! They had the wrong guy!�

It turned out the court had screwed up and dragged another Vietnamese man, a thief named Hen Van Nguyen, up from the jails to sit at trial for the Rollins murder. The real killer�s own lawyer didn�t even notice. It was a landmark moment in the history of �they all look alike to me.� The judge declared a mistrial, but a month later the actual defendant, Tieu, was still sentenced to life in prison, despite the fact that most of the key witnesses had fingered a completely different person for the crime under oath.

That incident might have been part of the reason the Vietnamese community packed up and left Gainesville en masse in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In their place came the Latinos, mostly from Mexico. Two decades ago Latinos made up 8 percent of the population here. By 2010 that number was 42 percent.

But now the Latinos, too, are starting to leave, which may be part of a larger trend of Latino immigrants returning home as the American economy worsens, making the country�s less appealing sides less worth putting up with. In this small Georgia community, for instance, the endless roadblocks and car stops mean that most local Latino residents get around using an exhausting regime of taxis, buses, and bicycles, and the constant harassment wears on them. �People are leaving,� says Aaron Rico, Jose�s brother and another Fiesta cabdriver. �Go to a city or something. It is getting to be too much.�

The war on immigrants in Georgia took an extraordinary turn in the middle of the last decade when the state passed a series of harsh laws outlining punishments for driving without a license. Passed in 2008, Georgia codes 40-5-20 and 40-5-120 created two completely different sets of punishments for the same crime.

They dictated that a natural-born Georgia citizen who is caught driving without a license is innocent of the crime, provided he gets a license before trial. In other words, even if he is technically guilty of the crime at the time of arrest, he can be declared retroactively innocent, so long as he takes a trip down to the DMV and gets himself a license. He doesn�t even have to pay a fine.

Meanwhile, an undocumented resident, who is not entitled to get a license before or after arrest, pays significant new penalties under the laws. He�s jailed for a minimum of two days (and a maximum of twelve), pays a fine of five hundred to a thousand dollars, and is convicted of a misdemeanor�or a felony if there are four offenses in five years.

There are no other laws like this in America that provide retroactive amnesty to some while others face significant punishment for the same crime. Some immigration lawyers claim the Georgia statutes would seem to violate the U.S. Constitution in at least two ways, first by creating an ex post facto law (banned in Article 1) and second by violating the �privileges and immunities� clause.

None of that matters: the laws are on the books, and since 2008 there�s been a sharp increase in the number of arrests of undocumented aliens for violating the no-license statute. The immigrants know this, which is why the daily effort to get to and from work has turned into something like an ongoing military campaign, with immigrants employing guerrilla strategies�cab networks, shared bicycles, carpooling, etc.�to try to avoid capture.

The problem is, some immigrants have no choice but to stay and take their chances, working in businesses where a bicycle won�t cut it. Alvaro Fernandez*1 is one of those people.

A native of Colombia, Alvaro has been in America for more than ten years and runs a successful construction business in the Hall County area, around Gainesville. He has good relationships all over the county, especially with former clients, but his problem is that he has to drive a truck to and from work to carry tools and equipment. �No cabs for me,� he says, shrugging and smiling.

�I was driving home one night at about ten p.m.,� he says now. �And that�s when the odyssey started.�

The giant dragnet created by 287(g) is inspiring a whole new generation of epic survival tales. The stories you hear from people who�ve disappeared at checkpoints and roadblocks sound eerily like the literature of the Soviet gulag, with the same themes of repeat interrogations, marches, chains, total alienation from family, and clashes with harsh nature, lunatic bureaucracies, and petty human predators of every imaginable species, some wearing uniforms and some not.

Alvaro came to America in 1999 with his wife on legal tourist visas. Like many of the Latino immigrants I interviewed for this book, he at one time had a legal driver�s license in America. �When I first came, I was able to get a license on my visa,� he says. �But when my visa expired, so did my license.�

For a while, things were cool. Alvaro built up his business, doing so well, in fact, that he�s been able to buy farmland back in his native country, setting himself or his children up for a future life as Colombian rural gentry. But the document problem nagged. He needed a driver�s license. At one point, as a stopgap measure, he made what would prove to be a fateful decision and bought himself a fake Mexican driver�s license. �They were easier to get,� he says. And when he got in a car accident in the early part of the last decade, he showed police his Mexican ID, which left him with a definite footprint in the system, as a Mexican.

All that past history came into play on the night in October 2010 when Alvaro was arrested at the checkpoint. He surrendered his truck and sat mute in the back of a squad car while two young white patrolmen took him to the local jail. He knew he would pop up in the system as a Mexican and, thinking it over in the car, silently made a command decision. If they sent him to Colombia, he realized, he might not see his wife and family again for a very long time, if ever.

�I would never be able to come back,� he says. �Not from Colombia.� Logistically, it�s harder to make it to the United States from the other side of South America, as opposed to a bordering state like Mexico.

So he decided to keep his mouth shut. Then when offered a stip order�the same deal offered to Ella and nearly every other detainee caught under 287(g)�he would take it. Instead of spending months in jail in America pending an immigration hearing, it might only be weeks. He�d be sent to Mexico, though he didn�t know where in Mexico, or how. And from Mexico, if he could find a way to connect with his family, he had a chance to have some money wired to him so he could buy a way back.

Alvaro had no idea what to expect. A fit, leather-skinned man of about fifty, with a shock of jet black hair, jovial eyes, a pronounced nose, and high cheekbones, he comes across as a worldly fellow and a man of experience but not necessarily a tough guy. He had never been in jail before.

�There were hard things, they were all hard,� he says now. �But the hardest thing was county jail. I was mixed in with really dangerous people.�

When he got to the jail, Alvaro�s immediate concern was to call a relative, specifically his nephew, to let him know what had happened and to start planning a way out. There was a phone in the jail, and inmates were allowed a half hour a day to talk. When the jailers rounded him up in the morning for breakfast and a shower, Alvaro thought he could make a call, too, and walked to the phone.

�What I didn�t know is that some of the black criminals in the jail �ran� the phone,� he says. �We weren�t allowed to use it without their permission. I didn�t know and just walked up to the phone, started dialing. Before I knew it, someone jumped on me, started hitting me. I took a blow on the side of the head.�

Other Hispanic inmates rushed to his aid. The fight subsided, but Alvaro still didn�t get to make the call. He tried a second time later on, and again he was attacked, only this time he fought back. �I hit the guy and knocked him down,� he says, with a bit of pride. �But the jailers came, and because I was fighting, they put me in the hole.�

The hole, he says, was a special cell three feet by four feet, with a solid iron door, an opening to shove food through, and no toilet. There was just a hole in the ground.

�It was really disgusting,� he says. �Actually everything about the jail was disgusting. Even the orange jumpsuit they gave us, it stank of sweat. The blankets also stank. And the hole, there was no air in there.

�But I was lucky. I was out of there in four hours, transferred to the immigration detention center.�

Alvaro�s trip wasn�t a long one. He moved to the North Georgia Detention Center, run by a private company called CCA, the Corrections Corporation of America. The CCA facility in Gainesville is basically a retooled version of an old city jail. In fact, it shares a building with the Gainesville Police Department. The facility, surrounded by giant coils of razor wire, is inopportunely located in a new enterprise-zone area of Gainesville, darkening the mood for the would-be yuppie-friendly coffee shop and poetry/arts center across the street.

Still, the facility�s presence in the zone isn�t inappropriate; CCA represents one of the great enterprise models in this new phase of the American economy, which is rich in such public-private profit schemes.

Alvaro�s experience hints at why. He moved from smelly jumpsuits and grimy blankets in the public jail to a Holiday Inn�like experience at CCA.

�Oh, yeah, muy bonito,� he says. �Clean T-shirts. Clean underwear. Tres pares,� he says, flashing a thumbs-up and laughing. �You get a sandwich, a good sandwich, a box lunch. You get a bath. Seriously, you get little shampoos, toothbrushes, toothpaste, a brush for your hair, you name it. It�s all high class.�

It should be. Depending on whom you believe, CCA receives upward of $166 per day from the federal government to care for immigrants like Alvaro, which is about four times what it used to cost the INS back in the days when the government took care of its own detainees.

The big influx of cash impressed investors on Wall Street. Back in 2000, when the federal government began housing immigrant detainees in mostly privately run prisons, CCA�s share price hovered around a dollar. Today, as I write this in the summer of 2013, CCA�s share price is $34.34. It was at $23 just two years ago. The company�s revenues went from just around $300 million in 2000 to an astonishing $1.7 billion in 2011. Overall, the corrections industry is one of the soundest stock/equity bets in the world, with soaring revenues�the industry as a whole pulled in more than $5 billion in America in 2011.

The jailing-Hispanics business is the perfect mix of politics and profit. Companies like CCA donate generously to politicians everywhere, particularly at the state level. The firm has spent as much as $3.4 million lobbying in a single year and on average spends between $1 million and $2 million a year. Its lobbyists are everywhere, and in every major anti-immigrant bill, you can usually find a current or former CCA lobbyist lurking in the weeds somewhere. Arizona governor Jan Brewer, for instance, had two ex�CCA lobbyists on her staff helping write the legislation when she pushed through her notorious 1070 law, which essentially legalized racial profiling in the cause of catching illegal immigrants.

In Alvaro�s Georgia, Governor Nathan Deal, Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle, and State Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers had all been longtime recipients of CCA contributions when they worked to pass HB 87, a profiling law very similar to Brewer�s 1070 bill.

The result is a huge win-win for industry and the politicians they work with. A governor like Jan Brewer publicly knocks on hated immigrants and wins votes, while CCA takes home $166 a day for every immigrant caught in the law enforcement net.

Local police forces go along because the federal government compensates them for their detention of immigrants. A program called the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP) pays local police forces out of the federal kitty for any detained immigrants who meet certain criteria (they�re undocumented, they stayed for at least four days, and they�ve been convicted of at least two misdemeanors). According to the GAO, states received about $1.6 billion annually in SCAAP payments through the end of the 2000s, and the numbers are likely to rise in this decade.

Meanwhile, local politicians go along with the arrests because they can pitch the construction of new detention facilities by firms like CCA, the GEO Group, and MTC as moves that create new jobs�just look at glowing press reports like this one, from a CBS affiliate along the Alabama-Georgia border, WRBL, in late 2011:

quote:
CCA BEGINS HIRING FOR NEW JENKINS FACILITY

New Georgia institution brings job prospects, economic boost to local community

There are only two losers in this daisy chain of political moves. First of course are the Hispanic immigrants, who don�t vote and are essentially without a real political lobby. The second group is their employers, and they do have a lobby, but there�s a compromise in the works for them (more on that later). Everyone else�the politicians, the company itself, the towns that see new jobs for white folks�they all win.

And someone else wins, too: Wall Street. Some of the biggest investors in private prison companies are, you guessed it, the too-big-to-fail banks. Wells Fargo, for instance, has nearly $100 million invested in the GEO Group, plus about $6 million in CCA. Bank of America, General Electric, Fidelity, and Vanguard are all major investors in at least one of the three big prison companies.

And why not? Like too-big-to-fail banking itself, private prisons are an industry that depends not on the unpredictable economy but upon political connections. It�s the perfect kind of business in the oligarchical capitalism age, with guaranteed profits to provide a low-cost public insurance against the vagaries of the market. Stock analysts, naturally, are not blind to the brilliance of the business formula.

�One of the best presentations I heard discussed,� wrote an analyst from Zacks, the stock research firm, �was the corrections industry and how it was a smart and uncommon place to put your money.� CCA, the analyst went on, was one of the top selections for its steady growth and defensive nature of its business. Economies may ebb and flow, but the number of incarcerated Americans is steadily growing according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

And then the analyst in his report gleefully showed this graph:

Sources: �The Punishing Decade,� Justice Policy Institute report; �Prisoners in 2006,� Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin NCJ 219416.

Who wouldn�t invest in that?

Theoretically, the political winds might have blown the same way without the profit motive. But there�s no way to look at the financial picture and not conclude that the explosive combination of anti-immigrant politics and easy profits turbocharged the construction of the Big Dragnet. Ironically, the very brokest people in America, Hispanic immigrants, are one of America�s last great cash crops.

One last reason immigrants are great business: as any good defense lawyer knows, the cost of freedom is always everything you have. To put it another way, people who have no documents and no rights are desperate, and desperation is a great natural price multiplier. For immigrants caught in the dragnet, the price of everything skyrockets, beginning, usually, with the traffic ticket, and the five-hundred-dollar or thousand-dollar no-license fines are extraordinarily high for what is essentially an administrative offense. In fact, a DUI, a far more serious crime, carries the same fine in the state of Georgia.

�It�s a moneymaking scheme, pure and simple,� sighs Corso, who�s defended scores of immigrants for no-license violations.

For Alvaro, his first hint that he�d entered a new pricing paradigm as a captured alien came in the CCA facility. In virtually every CCA-run facility across America, detainees are allowed access to a commissary, where they can buy random items: Popsicles, ramen noodles, candy bars. �But everything costs three or four times the real price,� he says. One item most every detainee buys is a prepaid phone card. In most CCA facilities, the prices for these cards are also extortionate, as much as nine dollars for a card that inmates can use to make three brief calls.

�You don�t have a choice,� says Alvaro. �You�ve got to buy the card. I bought one, called my nephew, explained what was happening to me. I told him to get some money ready. I didn�t know what was coming, but I wanted to prepare.�

Once they move from the local lockup to the CCA prison, detainees enter a weird legal gray area. Like disappeared persons from the gulag era, they�re told nothing about their captivity and often have no idea how long it will be before their case is decided. The uncertainly becomes part of the interrogation process. �In my case, I didn�t get to talk to an ICE caseworker for a week and a half,� says Alvaro. �For some guys, it�s two days. Others wait for two, three weeks. You have no idea.�

When he did finally meet with his interrogator, he got the same pitch that Ella received: he had a piece of paper pushed at him, and he was asked to sign a waiver and accept voluntary deportation.

Most immigrants at least hesitate. Alvaro surprised his interrogator, a clean-shaven white ICE agent with a crew cut and heavily muscled forearms, by quickly accepting the voluntary deportation order. �I played dumb,� he says. The ICE agent eyed him suspiciously, shrugged, and took the paper away.

Days went by. Alvaro passed the time in the comically cozy CCA facility playing checkers, soccer, a little basketball. It was a relief, he says now, to be in the immigration center. �I hate to say this,� he says, �but it�s so much more dangerous to be in the county jail with the other Americans. In the CCA center it was mostly all people who�d been caught on their way to work, people with jobs. It was not a dangerous place.

�I made some friends in there, especially some younger men from Mexico who were very scared. I think they looked up to me a little. I promised to look after them until we got to the border. It was in the back of my mind that they might be able to help me once we got there.�

Nobody knew when that would be. But one morning Alvaro and all the other men were roused at five a.m. They were all put in leg chains, waist chains, and handcuffs and marched out of the CCA facility into a bus. �We were all chained,� he says. �From five in the morning until we boarded an airplane later that night, we were in chains and couldn�t go to the bathroom.�

The journey Alvaro describes from Gainesville onward is surreal. �Like a movie,� he says. They traveled from place to place, the caravan picking up more buses with more people caught in car stops and checkpoints at each place. �We went to Atlanta first, and there we met up with more people. More buses, buses, buses. I had to rub my eyes to make sure I was really seeing so many people.

�In my bus there were two men who had been in jail for drugs. The rest were people like me who�d been caught on the way to work. None of us knew exactly where we were going, but we knew we were headed for the border.�

From Atlanta, the caravan made its way westward and eventually reached an airport in Columbus, Georgia, where it was understood that the group would be flown to the border. �It was hard because the plane wasn�t ready,� Alvaro explains. �We sat there in the heat in chains waiting, waiting. Some people were getting unwell.*2 From the windows we were all watching; we saw strange things.

�The men and the women were segregated, of course, but we saw a bus full of women. One of them apparently had to go to the bathroom, so she was led out of the bus. She was in full chains�legs, hands, and hands chained to the waist. It seemed so unnecessary. Except for a few, none of us were criminals. We couldn�t escape anywhere. Anyway this woman, they led her to one of those�what do you call them?�

A Porta-Potty?

�Yes, exactly,� he says. �The guards, and there were several of them, they led her to the toilet and just pushed her in, still in chains. All of us on the bus watching this were in amazement. It would be hard even for a man to find a way to go to the bathroom with all those restraints on.

�You could see her asking the guard to undo her cuffs, but he wouldn�t. She went inside the toilet, stayed in for a while, and came out. I don�t know how she managed.�

Finally the plane arrived. For the men it was a relief, because they were allowed to urinate before boarding. �But they kept the chains on,� Alvaro says.*3

The airplane he was boarding was bigger than anything he had ever seen. �There must have been four hundred fifty of us. It was a gigantic aircraft.� The crowd of men and women got on board, still in chains, and sat through a short flight south, to Texas.

Once there, they were quickly loaded onto buses again and driven straight to an international bridge that would lead them across the border. Here, finally, the chains were removed, and Alvaro learned where he would be released, the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo. From his seat on the bus, he peered through the window toward the border and started to think through his options, when suddenly there was a disturbance at the front of the vehicle.

�One of the men, I think, made some kind of sarcastic comment to one of the guards,� he says. �I�m not sure what it was. Something about the chains, maybe. I remember the guard suddenly turning red. In English, he said something like, �You want to get tough? You want to get smart?� And the guy, he didn�t back down, and next thing you know there are four more guards in the bus. He�s leaning back in his seat, pointing his chin out at them.

�I�m thinking, uh-oh. Within a few moments they dragged that guy out of the bus. Took him away somewhere, no idea where.�

Not even certain why, Alvaro made a mental note of the man�s face.

Soon the bus door was opened, and the men inside were motioned to get out. Each of the detainees was handed a box with his property, which was the clothes he had been wearing at the time of arrest, mainly. They all changed clothes and began walking. A line of guards on either side of the detainees created a makeshift corridor. The line of people was so long, Alvaro could not see the end of it.

As he walked over the Rio Grande into Mexico, he considered the absurdity of his situation. He was being repatriated to a country he had never been to, where he knew no one and had no connections. He thought everything he had been through to that point had been difficult. �In truth, that was just the warm-up,� he says now. �The hard part was just starting.�

Once over the bridge, the group took on the feeling of a gang of prison escapees, each man unsure of whether the survival odds were better alone or in a group. Some gathered in big crowds, others went off alone. Alvaro stayed with the two young Mexican men he�d taken under his wing in Gainesville.

An undocumented immigrant is like a bleeding fish. Every predator for miles around will swim at top speed to take a bite. For Alvaro, the process had begun back in America, with the police who stopped him at night and slapped him with a seven-hundred-dollar ticket. It continued with the overpriced soups and phone cards in the CCA facility. It was now about to continue in Mexico.

He had $60 in his pocket, and going off toward downtown Nuevo Laredo with the two young men, his first thought was to change his money. There was an exchange window right near the bridge. The exchange rate at the time was 12 pesos to a dollar. He pushed his $60 across. The woman handed him back 600 pesos, seemingly expecting he wouldn�t notice she was shorting him 120 pesos.

�Apparently a lot of the men who come across the bridge do not count so well,� he says. �It took some arguing, but I got my dollars back. We moved on.�

From there Alvaro decided to get a hotel room with the two men, until they could find relatives to come and get them. He was on his way to doing that when he decided to call his nephew back in Gainesville at a phone booth. The instant he dialed the States, he felt a pair of arms grabbing him from behind. �I turned around, and it was a policeman,� he says. �A bicycle policeman, as it happened�his bike was leaning up against a wall.�

The two other young men Alvaro was with scattered when the policeman arrived. Meanwhile, the bike cop demanded that Alvaro identify himself and then told him he was under arrest.

�For what?� Alvaro asked.

�For making an illegal phone call,� the policeman said. The ticket, he said, was going to be three hundred pesos.

Alvaro stood his ground, arguing with the bicycle policeman, who eventually gave up and went away. He shook his head and laughed. An illegal phone call?

Watching this scene the whole time was an elderly man who was sitting at a shoeshine stand, waiting for customers. When Alvaro was finally done with the policeman, the old man waved him over.

�He introduced himself, asked me where I was from,� Alvaro says. �I told him, �I�ve just come from up north.� He says to me, �You come with me, you will be my guest for the night, forget about the hotel.� �

Alvaro headed toward the old man�s house, stopping along the way to buy some groceries, some hot dogs, eggs, something to eat. They walked for a long time, entering neighborhoods that were progressively more and more beaten down, until finally they reached a section of the city that was completely devastated. Alvaro again remarked to himself the strangeness of his situation. �The houses were burned down, or else in complete disrepair. They were empty and boarded up,� he says. �This gave me pause. I asked the old man, �What happened here?� He says, �Don�t ask.� �

Finally they made it to the old man�s house. Alvaro immediately sensed that something was odd about the home. The old man was in his late sixties and almost in rags, but he had a wife who was young and pretty. �She was twenty-five at most,� Alvaro says, �and pregnant with his child. She was very nice and didn�t seem surprised that I was there. And there were two other children in the house who were not his, and might not have been hers, either. I didn�t ask questions.�

After the long journey, Alvaro slept well; the next morning the shoe shiner took him to a downtown plaza, where he was introduced to someone described to him as �the man. The main man.� The jefe was some sort of local mafioso to whom the shoe shiner and everyone else in the area was paying tribute. �It was wild,� Alvaro says. �The guy didn�t have a telephone, but when he wanted to make a call, someone would bring him a telephone and say something like, �Here�s your telephone, boss.� It was like meeting Jabba the Hutt.�

But the jefe, who went by the odd name Fitus, was good to Alvaro. Fitus told him that he could arrange a coyote, for a price. Alvaro, without getting into too many details about his life, explained that he could have some money wired, but it might take a day. Fitus seemed fine with that. He even lent Alvaro a few hundred dollars in the meantime and told him to come back the next day, or as soon as he could, with the deposit.

�While in town, I made some calls and arranged for money to be wired,� Alvaro says. �Also it was Halloween night that night, so before I went back to the old man�s house again, I bought candy for the children and some toys with the money I�d borrowed. But this second night, things went very wrong at the old man�s house. He bought some very strong beer and he got very drunk.

�Almost right away, he quarreled with that pretty young wife of his. Then he began to really give it to her. He was hitting her. I tried to tell him, �I know I�m a guest, but I can�t let you hurt your wife.� So he threw me out of the house.�

It was Halloween night. Alvaro found himself alone in the pitch-black, burned-out neighborhood. He looked for a cab. Passing a junkie on the street, he asked where he could get a taxi.

�He laughed and said, �You must not be from around here. No taxis will come here,� � Alvaro says. �So I walked farther. Finally I found a cab after some time. They took me to a hotel, and I checked in. And then I made a very serious mistake. I called Colombia.�

This call was the portal into the mirror image of the American deportation machine. It turns out there�s a dragnet on the other side of the border, too.

In Mexico, there is crime, and then there�s organized crime, and then there are the Zetas, a group of gangsters known for their extreme cruelty and technical sophistication. The group was originally formed in the 1990s by Special Forces commandos, had a brief alliance with a drug organization known as the Gulf Cartel, and then broke off on its own to create a powerful crime syndicate that not only traffics in drugs but makes money through extortion and kidnapping. The Zeta trademark includes beheadings and a preference for torture over bribery. And one of the Zeta businesses involves people like Alvaro.

When he made the call out of the country, he came to the attention of these gangsters, who monitor the calls of hotel residents. An hour after he made the call, men arrived at his hotel room, dragged him outside, and threw him into a car. Alvaro was terrified but said nothing. He was driven in total silence to a big house on the outskirts of town. When he was pushed inside, he was shocked to discover familiar faces.

�There must have been twenty-five or thirty of the people who�d walked over the bridge from Laredo with me,� he says. �They�d all been kidnapped by the Zetas. They went straight from ICE custody to Zeta custody.�

Among the men in custody was the unfortunate character who had argued with the ICE officials in Alvaro�s bus on the other side of the border. Alvaro asked him what happened when the guards took him away. The man laughed. �Oh, they slapped me around a little,� he said. �But nothing serious. Not like this.�

The Zetas, Alvaro learned, operate on a simple business model. They know that most of the immigrants deported out of the United States have left relatives behind in America. Many of the deportees� relatives have saved money to bring more loved ones to the States from Mexico. That makes the deportees natural kidnapping targets.

Alvaro asked some of the men there what their situation was. Depending on the immigrant, the Zetas were demanding to be wired five thousand to seven thousand dollars before they would be released. Alvaro asked if there was any guarantee that they would even be released after the Zetas got the money. The men shrugged.

Soon, however, his captors took him aside. �So the Zetas start asking me questions about who I am and what I�m doing,� he says. �I tell them, �I�m no Mexican. I�m not like these men. I�m a Colombian, and I�m heading north.� They ask me, �Who�s helping you through? Who�s arranging the coyote?�

�And that�s when I got lucky. I told them Fitus was helping me. That changed everything.�

Once he dropped Fitus�s name, the Zetas disappeared and had a discussion. Soon they came back and told him, �Hang tight. We�re going to check this out with Fitus.�

So Alvaro spent a whole day in captivity, in the house outside Laredo, with the twenty-five other deportees. But Fitus vouched for Alvaro, and he was released from the haunted house. He has no idea what happened to the other men.

From there, Alvaro began the long journey back to America. He got money wired to Fitus�s friends and was taken to a place in Nuevo Laredo called the Spot. It was like a safe house.

There were twenty to thirty people in a filthy room. �No ventilation, no bathrooms, these were people who wouldn�t know what toilet paper is,� Alvaro explains. �I spent three days there. I had to sleep on a terrace outside, because the mosquitoes on the first floor were unbearable.�

Finally he and the others got on a bus, headed west, to the neighboring Mexican state of Coahuila. There, by the side of a road, they met up with two coyotes. One of them, Alvaro remembers, was extremely drunk.

Then, in a strange echo of the journey from Gainesville to Laredo, the group moved toward the Rio Grande, stopping from time to time to accumulate more members of the convoy. �At first there were three groups of twenty or so,� he says. �Then we disappeared behind some trees and met up with some more. Finally, when we got to the banks of the river, there were about two hundred of us.�

The two hundred huddled people were given minimal food and water while they waited for a boat to arrive. Night came and everyone slept in the open air. Then morning, then afternoon. The food and water vanished. There was nothing left. Alvaro began to get worried.

But finally men arrived with an inflatable raft and began moving people across the river a few at a time. �We got to the United States side,� he says. �And we started walking. And walking. And walking.�

The vegetation near the river disappeared into the background. Soon it was all desert. �After an hour we made it to the first fence,� he says. �It was ten or twelve feet high. What could we do? We climbed over.�

An hour or so later they made it to a second fence. But there was a problem. One of the travelers, a young man, was too weak to go on. �He couldn�t walk anymore,� Alvaro says. �So it was decided that he would walk toward the road and give himself up. We sent him one way, and the rest of us broke up into groups. The hope was that we would get some kind of head start. But within an hour, we saw the helicopter overhead.�

Alvaro�s group by that point consisted of twenty-three people. When the helicopter came, they split into two groups and ran. When they found each other again, the two groups numbered seventeen and four.

�Two children were missing,� Alvaro says, pausing. �The coyotes were communicating with each other by cell phone, and they were scrambling to find the missing kids. But they couldn�t. They were gone.�

Alvaro pauses while telling this part of the story, reliving this dilemma. It�s clear he still hasn�t quite sorted it all out in his head.

�We had no choice,� he says finally. �We had to keep walking.�

Alvaro and the group ended up walking for two more days. Eventually they met up with more coyotes and were driven by pickup truck to a mobile home outside San Antonio. The interior of the mobile home had recently been set on fire, so while it looked fine from the outside and drove well enough, the inside was almost completely charred. There were two men, a woman, and two grown children living inside this charred mobile home. All twenty-one of the remaining travelers piled into the blackened vehicle with them.

Once there, they were given an ultimatum. �The deal on the Mexico side had been one thousand dollars to get us to Houston,� says Alvaro. �But we got in the RV, and suddenly the price was twelve hundred dollars. I refused to pay and so did the others. So now we were kidnapped again. They took our shoes at night and gave us only minimal food and water.�

Alvaro says the situation got so desperate inside the RV that the group started going through the burned cabinets in the kitchen. The charred cabinet doors literally fell apart as they opened them up.

�Amazingly,� Alvaro says, �we found some bread in there. It was a little black on the outside, but it was edible. We all split it and ate it. I couldn�t believe I had been reduced to this.�

Finally, Alvaro�s family wired enough money to satisfy the coyotes. He hitched a ride with one of the other captives to Mississippi, and from there his nephew drove and picked him up to bring him back to Gainesville.

The whole adventure had taken about a month.

I ask Alvaro if he still drives to work.

He shrugs. �I have to,� he says.

this sort of thing is completely and utterly invisible to almost all white people, and in particular powerful and wealthy people who are utterly insulated and removed from this sort of goings-on in America -- thus the title of the book, "The Divide". the criminal "justice" system in America, the taxation system, the government, it's all completely different for the upper classes. they get special treatment that the lower classes don't get, they get privileges and power and leeway. hedge fund trader drives drunk home from the club? he'll get a warning and possibly enrollment in sobriety courses if the judge is feeling particularly punitive. meanwhile some mother of 6 kids has her car impounded 3 times for Driving While Mexican, completely destroying her life repeatedly and putting huge amounts of stress on her children

class distinctions are some of the most poisonous things that's going on in American society, and doubly so because it's so hard to communicate the huge disparity in lived experiences to someone who lives in a literally completely different world.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2017 20:51

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

the bitcoin of weed posted:

the divide seems really good and i should probably read it but i feel like I'd get dangerously mad and blow out my eardrums or something

it's taken me about two or three weeks to get through The Divide because I keep having to put it down and walk away

# ¿ Dec 20, 2017 21:47

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

Karl Barks posted:

also

To-yo-ta Ce-li-ca

I really should reread this book, I first (and last) read it in one of my freshman year lit courses. I don't think I understood the entirety of what the book was trying to communicate very well at the time but the Toyota Celica passage still sticks with me years later

As well as the passage about how grocery stores are hell, that one is good. Lemme see if I can dig up that excerpt to post it...

# ¿ Dec 21, 2017 01:02

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

Epic High Five posted:

pitch me on it, I read a few reviews on it and they mentioned "disjoined" and "post-modern" so I immediately didn't like it

as a freshman I really disliked how banal everything was and the writing got on my nerves because of it, but looking back that was the point, and my reaction was more an allergic reaction to what DeLillo was describing than anything about the writing style itself

the book's about a deeply boring suburban family struggling with the fear of death, and then something called the Airborne Toxic Event happens, which sends their whole society into pieces. the rest of the book is about their attempts to piece back together a semblance of a normal life, trying to force the illusion of a stable, functioning society back into existence, and their success at doing that is at best questionable. everything's kinda presented in a way that contrasts how absurd and artificial a lot of our cultural and societal structures are. my initial reaction, as a young person, was to go "my life is absolutely nothing like jack gladney's" but as I've gotten older the cracks in society are becoming more and more visible to me and the book's become more relevant. After hunting down the book to get the (upcoming) passage and skim over it to do this pitch I think I'll definitely reread it

if you like pynchon you'll probably like delillo.

this is one of the more memorable passages from the book, imo

quote:

In the barracks almost everyone was sleeping. I made my way along a dim wall. The massed bodies lay in heavy rest, seeming to emit a single nasal sigh. Figures stirred; a wide-eyed Asian child watched me step among a dozen clustered sleeping bags. Colored lights skipped past my right ear. I heard a toilet flush.

Babette was curled on an air mattress, covered in her coat. My son slept sitting in a chair like some boozed commuter, head rolling on his chest. I carried a camp chair over to the cot where the younger children were. Then I sat there, leaning forward, to watch them sleep.

A random tumble of heads and dangled limbs. In those soft warm faces was a quality of trust so absolute and pure that I did not want to think it might be misplaced. There must be something, somewhere, large and grand and redoubtable enough to justify this shining reliance and implicit belief. A feeling of desperate piety swept over me. It was cosmic in nature, full of yearnings and reachings. It spoke of vast distances, awesome but subtle forces. These sleeping children were like figures in an ad for the Rosicrucians, drawing a powerful beam of light from somewhere off the page. Steffie turned slightly, then muttered something in her sleep. It seemed important that I know what it was. In my current state, bearing the death impression of the Nyodene cloud, I was ready to search anywhere for signs and hints, intimations of odd comfort. I pulled my chair up closer. Her face in pouchy sleep might have been a structure designed solely to protect the eyes, those great, large and apprehensive things, prone to color phases and a darting alertness, to a perception of distress in others. I sat there watching her. Moments later she spoke again. Distinct syllables this time, not some dreamy murmur�but a language not quite of this world. I struggled to understand. I was convinced she was saying something, fitting together units of stable meaning. I watched her face, waited. Ten minutes passed. She uttered two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive at the same time, words that seemed to have a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant.

Toyota Celica.

A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile. The truth only amazed me more. The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform. It made me feel that something hovered. But how could this be? A simple brand name, an ordinary car. How could these near-nonsense words, murmured in a child�s restless sleep, make me sense a meaning, a presence? She was only repeating some TV voice. Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica, Toyota Cressida. Supranational names, computer-generated, more or less universally pronounceable. Part of every child�s brain noise, the substatic regions too deep to probe. Whatever its source, the utterance struck me with the impact of a moment of splendid transcendence.

I depend on my children for that.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2017 01:42

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

A friend bought me "A Murder on the Appian Way" by Steven Saylor after I expressed interest in non-military-focused* Roman historical fiction a couple months ago. Looking forward to getting into this.

*: Seriously, the market for Roman-era historical fiction is 99% either military or Roman female nobles.

# ¿ Dec 26, 2017 04:49

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

Matt Taibbi, the Divide posted:

Over and over again, we hear that if you owe money in a certain way, or if you receive a certain kind of public assistance, you forfeit this or that line item in the Bill of Rights. If you�re a person of means, you get full service for all ten amendments, and even a few that aren�t listed. But if you owe, if you rent, you get a slightly thinner, more tubercular version of the Fourth Amendment, the First Amendment, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and so on.

It�s not that it�s written anywhere that if you�re black and you live in the projects, you don�t get protection against illegal searches�it just sort of works out that way. And if this makes any sense at all, it�s not about skin color. This is a cultural kind of bias. White people who live the wrong way get caught in the net, too. And as the income gap gets bigger and bigger, more and more white people are being pushed behind the line.

The major precedent for the Sanchez v. San Diego suit was a Supreme Court case from the 1970s called Wyman v. James. In that one, a black single mother named Barbara James applied for and received welfare. After some time on public assistance, a caseworker called and asked to set up an appointment to see James in her home. James told the caseworker she was happy to meet on neutral territory, but that she didn�t see any need to let the caseworker into the house. The caseworker disagreed and nixed her benefits. A lawsuit ensued, and it made it all the way to the Supreme Court in 1971, where the nation�s top justices asked the question: Does the Fourth Amendment apply to people on welfare?

Justice Harry Blackmun, writing for the majority, explained that it didn�t. The state, Blackmun wrote, �has appropriate and paramount interest and concern in seeing and assuring that the intended and proper objects of that tax-produced assistance are the ones who benefit from the aid it dispenses.� He added that �surely it is not unreasonable � that the State have at its command a gentle means � of achieving that assurance.�

Writing the dissent in Wyman was Justice William Douglas, ably playing the supporting-actor part of the concerned-but-habitually-ignored civil libertarian. (Most of the legal dramas resulting in lost rights over the years would feature the same mopey character.) Douglas argued that the Wyman ruling was nuts because not just poor black ladies from the Bronx, but almost everyone lives off the government teat to one degree or another:

We are living in a society where one of the most important forms of property is government largesse which some call the �new property.� � Defense contracts, highway contracts, and the other multifarious forms of contracts are another part. So are subsidies to air, rail, and other carriers. So are disbursements by government for scientific research. So are TV and radio licenses to use the air space which of course is part of the public domain.�

In 1969 roughly 127 billion dollars were spent by the federal, state, and local governments on �social welfare.� To farmers alone almost four billion dollars were paid.� Almost 129,000 farmers received $5,000 or more, their total benefits exceeding $1,450,000,000.

If we eliminate Fourth Amendment protection for everyone who receives public assistance, he implied, where does it end? Who wouldn�t have to let a government worker into his house? Would all 129,000 farmers have to let government agents into their homes, to make sure the subsidies reached the right target?

�If you go by the logic in Wyman,� says Halpern, the San Diego lawyer, �anyone who claims a tax deduction could be searched.�

But Douglas was overruled, of course, because the implicit intent of Wyman�not its explicit intent, but very much the implied meaning�didn�t cover everyone, just black welfare moms like Barbara James. No one else had to trade the Bill of Rights for government aid. So the state got to keep its �gentle means� of checking to make sure tax dollars were reaching appropriate destinations.

Incidentally, the Court back then specifically noted that the �gentle means� was not made by �police or uniformed authority,� and that the visiting agent was �not a sleuth but rather, we trust � a friend to one in need.�

Thirty-five years later, in Sanchez v. San Diego, the visiting agent would be transformed into a law enforcement agent and professional sleuth, and the �friend in need� would be someone who roots around in underwear drawers with pencil ends. But the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, led by an internment camp survivor named A. Wallace Tashima, nonetheless decided P100 wasn�t in any way unconstitutional. Tashima�s bizarre reasoning was that the P100 visits were not searches under the Fourth Amendment�but even if they were searches, they were not unreasonable.

Why are they reasonable? Because, Tashima said, the public �has a strong interest in ensuring that aid provided from tax dollars reaches its proper and intended recipients.�

So the standard is, anyone who receives aid from taxpayers forgoes his rights, because the state has a �strong interest� in rooting out fraud.

But of course not everyone who receives state aid forgoes his or her rights, not really. To whom does this legal principle apply?

Well, we know to whom, but we can�t put it on paper. It�s like pornography, you know it when you see it. As Americans, we�re all beginning to develop a second sense about who gets to feel the business end of the criminal justice system, and when, and who doesn�t, and why.

That second sense we all carry around in our minds is our true government. It�s very different from the Schoolhouse Rock! official version, and different from the one we see celebrated every four years in our presidential campaign system. Schoolhouse Rock! teaches us that everyone is treated equally under the law, and that our government is one we�ve chosen in free elections, but at the same time we somehow know not to be surprised when that turns out not to be completely true. This has been hammered home to all of us in the recent years following the financial crash, when the dichotomy in the system has grown more and more visible, creeping higher and higher in our collective consciousness.

For instance, while the San Diego District Attorney�s Office spent more than a decade sifting through thousands of dresser drawers and bringing felony cases all the way to court for frauds as small as four hundred dollars, executives in the same general area of Southern California, at companies like Countrywide and Long Beach Mortgage, were pioneering the brilliant mass fraud scheme that involved the sales of toxic mortgage-backed securities.

One of the favorite targets of that fraud scheme was government and the taxpayer. These companies, along with their bankers, loved more than anything to sell worthless mortgage bonds to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-backed housing agencies.

Just one Southern Californian company, Countrywide, dumped as much as $26.6 billion on the taxpayer and the state when it sold overvalued bonds to Fannie and Freddie. Bank of America, its eventual parent company, sold another $6 billion to Fannie and Freddie. Fifteen other companies also targeted the federal government for hundreds of millions and billions more. The state of California�s pension fund, CalPERS, was also the target of massive fraud schemes, as banks, mortgage lenders, and ratings agencies conspired to sell California workers billions more in worthless securities in exchange for their life savings.

By the time all these companies were finished first inflating and then crashing a huge global asset bubble based on overvalued mortgages, the world had lost trillions of dollars�one extremely conservative estimate by the IMF put the losses at $4 trillion. But despite having been warned about the possibility of widespread mortgage fraud by the FBI as early as 2004, financial cops in regulatory agencies like the SEC and the OCC didn�t respond to the problem at all until well after the crash.

When they finally did respond, they did so by bringing civil suits against companies like Countrywide, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wachovia, TD Ameritrade, Goldman Sachs, Charles Schwab, and others.

In the twenty-one biggest federal settlements over mortgage fraud abuses�$300 million from State Street for lying to investors, $153 million from Chase in the Magnetar settlement, and so on�those companies and a few others paid a total of $26 billion in damages to the government. In every single one of those cases, the relevant companies were allowed to settle without admitting wrongdoing. Not a single individual was charged in any of those cases. Not a single individual had to pay so much as a dime of his own money in damages.

Not one home was searched. No banker ever had someone pick up his underwear by a pencil end and wave it in his face.

Twenty-six billion dollars of fraud: no felony cases. But when the stakes are in the hundreds of dollars, we kick in 26,000 doors a year, in just one county.

You can drive yourself crazy trying to figure out how this makes sense, financial or otherwise. But it does make sense. It�s just not about money. It�s about loving with people. It�s the logic of our new shadow government.

It turns out that we�re too lazy to govern ourselves, so we�ve put society on bureaucratic autopilot�and autopilot turns out to be a steel trap for losers and a greased pipeline to money, power, and impunity for winners.

This goes far beyond the oft-quoted liberal clich� about how we now have �two Americas,� one for the rich and one for the poor, with different sets of laws and different levels of punishment (or more to the point, nonpunishment) for each. The rich have always gotten breaks and the poor have always had to swim upstream. The new truth is infinitely darker and more twisted.

The new truth is a sci-fi movie, a dystopia. And in this sci-fi world the issues aren�t justice and injustice, but biology and mortality. We have a giant, meat-grinding bureaucracy that literally alters the physical makeup of its citizens, systematically grinding down the losers into a smaller, meeker, lower race of animal while aggrandizing the winners, making them bigger than life, impervious, super-people.

Again, the poor have always faced the sharp end of the stick. And the rich have always fought ferociously to protect their privilege, not just in America but everywhere.

What�s different now is that these quaint old inequities have become internalized in that �second government��a vast system of increasingly unmanageable bureaucracies, spanning both the public and the private sectors. These inscrutable, irrational structures, crisscrossing back and forth between the worlds of debt and banking and law enforcement, are growing up organically around the pounding twin impulses that drive modern America: burning hatred of all losers and the poor, and breathless, abject worship of the rich, even the talentless and undeserving rich.

No one is managing these bureaucracies anymore. They are managing us. Just as corporations are brainless machines for making profits, this sweepingly complex system of public-private bureaucracies that constitutes our modern politics is just a giant, brainless machine for creating social inequity.

It mechanically, automatically keeps the poor poor, devours money from the middle class, and sends it upward. And because it�s fueled by the irrepressibly rising vapor of our darkest hidden values, it attacks people without money, particularly nonwhite people, with a weirdly venomous kind of hatred, treating them like they�re already guilty of something, which of course they are�namely, being that which we�re all afraid of becoming.

In the Orwellian dystopia the original sin was thoughtcrime, but in our new corporate dystopia the secret inner crime is need, particularly financial need. People in America hide financial need like they hide sexual perversions.

Why? Because there�s a direct correlation between need and rights. The more you need, the more you owe, the fewer rights you have.

Conversely, the less you need, the more you have, the more of a free citizen you get to be. On the extreme ends of this spectrum it is literally a crime to be poor, while a person with enough money literally cannot be prosecuted for certain kinds of crimes.

What keeps the poor poor and rushes the money upward is the complexity of the bureaucracy. If you�re the wrong kind of person and you get caught up in the criminal justice system, or stuck in the welfare bureaucracy, or mired in debt, you can�t get out without navigating a maze so complex and dispiriting and irrational that it can�t possibly even be mapped. It�s not brains that you need to get through it, but time, energy, strength. You have to stand on line after line, send letter after letter, make call after call.

And if you want to change even the smallest law, in your home state or in Washington, you need an army of thousands of lobbyists to get it done. And even in the rare case that you succeed, you then need to commit to ten years or more of furiously boring legal battles and inane bureaucratic rule-writing sessions and fend off tens or hundreds of thousands of pages of dissenting reports and comment letters and policy papers, all developed mechanically by an industry that responds not by human decision, but bureaucratic reflex.

On the other side of the coin, the secret to conquering the financial bureaucracy isn�t savvy and business sense, or the ability to spot a good entrepreneurial idea. Instead, it�s pure bureaucratic force, the ability to throw a hundred lawyers at every problem, to file a thousand motions and never get tired, to file ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million lawsuits.

In other words, you need to be a bureaucracy in order to survive one. This is the overwhelming narrative of modern American economics, that the individual, particularly the individual without a lot of money, is inherently overmatched. He�s a loser. And if he falls into any part of the machine, he goes straight to the bottom.

America's basically gone completely insane, and Trump is honestly just a symptom of the problem -- as anyone who's been reading this subforum for a while knows -- and the rot went terminal years and years ago. This book is really depressing/infuriating to read.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2017 23:49

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

This country is completely bugfuck insane and so many of us are playing with fire here

not even the "good states" are safe

Matt Taibbi, the Divide posted:

This is the kind of person at whom the weight of the state�s financial fraud prosecution apparatus tends to be trained in America. Markisha entered the financial fraud patrol zone when she walked through those doors at the FRC. For three hundred dollars a month, she was about to become more heavily scrutinized by the state than any twelve Wall Street bankers put together.

The amounts of money spent in these kinds of welfare programs are very small, but the levels of political capital involved are mountainous. You can always score political points banging on black welfare moms on meth. And the bureaucracy she was about to enter reflects that intense, bitterly contemptuous interest. Markisha was walking into a vast, machinelike system that is not only more or less designed to produce felony fraud convictions, but is also amazingly effective at a second goal�letting her know exactly what voters out there think of her.

On the day she goes to sign up for CalWORKs, Markisha knows to show up early. Friends she knew who�d been in the system had warned her: get there early. Get there way before the doors open. You�ll see why when you get there, they told her.

In the neighborhoods people talk. Some welfare offices are more notorious than others. In San Diego I heard over and over again that the Lemon Grove office was the best. Sometimes, people say, you can see a counselor at Lemon Grove in less than an hour�you might not even see people yelling and screaming. The Market Street office, on the other hand, has a bad rep. Same with the Seventy-Third Street office. The problem is, you can�t choose which office to go to. It depends on your address. And Markisha�s address puts her in the Seventy-Third Street group.

On the morning of October 15, 2011, she shows up at the Seventy-Third Street office at 8:30 a.m. It�s a giant hall with linoleum floors and plastic chairs�exactly what you�d expect, like a DMV, only even more depressing. There�s already a huge line of people.

�People were standing up against the walls, there was people everywhere, all over, it was crazy,� she says. The drill is, you show up, take a number, and wait�and wait. Markisha takes her number and sits down.

An hour passes, two hours. She has no idea when anyone is going to see her, and all the people in the packed room are in the same boat.

Mothers with children are in the office, and by late morning the children are starting to get antsy because they haven�t eaten, but you can�t leave the place or you lose your spot in line. A chill goes through the room in the middle of the day when a woman steps outside the building to get a smoke and returns to find that her number has been called. She has to leave and come back another day.

More hours pass. Markisha is squirming in her seat. By the late afternoon the crowd, which not only hasn�t subsided over the course of the day but has just gotten bigger, is turning hostile. At around three in the afternoon there�s a screaming match somewhere in the recesses of the office. Markisha can hear a man yelling at a welfare worker because a glitch in the system has cost him his benefits; something about a wrong address, which they�re telling him they can�t fix. He storms out of the office to oohs and aahs. By then the place is a zoo. �The kids is running around, because they hungry,� she says. �They�re running around, snatching stuff off the walls, drinking water, screaming.�

The scene gets so intense, Markisha ends up pulling out her cell phone and taking a video panorama of the chaos. Nobody even blinks when they see her standing up filming the nightmare. You see all kinds of stuff in here: Who cares about some girl filming something?

More hours pass. It�s after five now. A young Latin man just ahead of Markisha goes in and just as quickly is dragged out by security when he explodes at a worker after finding out he can�t get his food stamp card�Markisha doesn�t know why. �I�ve been here since eight o�clock in the morning and I�m still here after five o�clock!� he shouts. �I�m just coming for my EBT card! I need my EBT card!�

Security drags him past Markisha, chucks him out the door. �I was like, dang,� she says. �I didn�t know what to think.� Finally, at 5:30, after nine hours, Markisha is shown into an office where a bored-looking older black woman stares blankly at her from behind a mass of papers.

�Let me tell you something right away, honey,� the woman says. �We got two whole rooms of papers right behind us here. Two rooms of applications to go through. So it�s going to be forty-five days before you get your benefits.�

By law, forty-five days is the maximum period of time the state can take before processing benefits. Markisha needs the money yesterday, but whatever; she knows enough not to say anything. She answers the woman�s questions. How many people live in your household? What�s your income? How come you can�t get a job?

Then the whopper. �How much,� the woman asks, �is your baby daddy giving you a month?�

�My what?� Markisha says.

�Your baby daddy,� the woman repeats. �He giving you money or not?�

Markisha answers: he is not. By the time the woman finishes with her, Markisha is in a panic, but she�s been approved for benefits. Go home, they tell her, and wait for someone from the DA�s office to search your home.

Wait when?

Just wait, they tell her.

Trying to get on welfare is like trying to get Rolling Stones tickets in the 1970s�you have to camp out in front of the entrance long before the ticket window opens. You go there, you take a number, then you sit all day long while people scream and yell all around you. If you have kids, you have to bring their lunches and you have to be careful about when you take them to the bathroom, because you might miss your call. �It�s worst in the afternoon,� says Anna Alvarez, a twenty-one-year-old with a newborn baby who applied for benefits with her husband, Diego. �The kids get hungry and they start screaming and acting out.�

Some people I interviewed went to the FRC and went through this all-day-in-a-DMV-from-hell process three and four times before they even got their initial meeting.

But the kicker is, if you get all the way through the process, and actually get your meeting, and you get approved, they then tell you to go home and sit tight for your P100 search. And they don�t tell you when that will be, except to say that it�s generally within a week and a half. You then have to be at home at all times until they show up�it�s like sitting shivah, except you have to do it for more than a week.

�If the investigator shows up and no one�s there,� says Halpern, �they shove a card under your door that says, �We could not verify your eligibility,� and you don�t get your benefits.�

The couple Diego and Anna handled their vigil in shifts, with one staying at home at all times, and the other, usually Diego, going out to work (he works at a Little Caesars) or to buy groceries. In their case, the investigator showed up six days later. In Markisha�s case, it was only a few days, but she had a problem: she was attending a court-ordered recovery program at eleven a.m. every Wednesday. It was literally illegal for her to miss the class; she could face charges. She explained this to the people at the FRC, but they weren�t interested. Right on cue, the investigator then showed up at 10:30 a.m. on that following Wednesday. He�s an older white guy, about fifty years old. He knocks, steps just barely inside the apartment, and takes a quick look around.

�You sure you don�t live here with the baby�s father?� he says.

Eric had just come by to take their son to school. The boy wasn�t home. The investigator doesn�t like this.

�I don�t think you�re really living here with your son,� he says.

Again, this is a constant feature of the welfare application process. Literally every single person I interviewed in San Diego at some point had a caseworker or someone from the DA�s office accuse them of lying within minutes. One woman named Selena, a quiet twenty-eight-year-old from Mexico who cleans houses and lives with her elderly mother, met the investigator by chance, coming home from work cleaning apartments just as he was leaving�Selena�s mother had let him in. The investigator asked Selena where she had been.

Cleaning houses, she said.

Yeah? the investigator asked. How much did you make?

Selena opened her wallet and showed him: $120. That money was for four apartments, she tried to explain, but he wouldn�t hear it. The investigator chirped that the going rate for an apartment cleaning was sixty bucks. Apparently he was speaking from experience haggling with maids.

�You�re lying to me about that money,� he said. �You didn�t earn that much cleaning apartments.�

Selena is meek, quiet, a little stout, and looks very much like someone who cleans houses for a living. The investigator, within minutes of meeting her, was accusing her of � what? Hooking? Selling crack?

Back to Markisha�s home search: the investigator didn�t like the absence of the child, despite the fact that it was 10:30 a.m. on a school day. She was sharing the apartment with another tenant, a local barber, but the investigator didn�t want to see his room. In fact, he didn�t want to see Markisha�s room, which had two beds in it, one for her and one for her son. He just stood in the doorway, looking around.

�I asked him if he wanted to see my room,� Markisha says. �But he said no. He just stood there.�

After a few minutes, the investigator jotted a few notes down, clicked his pen, and turned to walk out the door. �Okay,� he said. �That�s my investigation.�

Just like they don�t tell you when they�re coming, they don�t tell you what their investigatory conclusions are. Markisha had to wait. A few weeks later she found out she was rejected�because the investigator didn�t believe she was living with her son.

Now she�s appealing the decision. In the meantime, she lost her apartment and is living with her aunt. Technically speaking, however, she�s temporarily in a safer place than applicants who immediately pass the search process. She dodged a bullet in the sense that the state decided she was lying before she started getting her checks. Once you start actually collecting benefits, you get put on the clock for a fraud case.

The couple Diego and Anna, for instance, were doing everything right. They are both bright, fit young kids; Anna is petite and cherubic, and Diego is on the shorter side but clean-cut, engaging, and good-looking. They met at the gym in the first months of 2011 and quickly fell in love. In the summer, they discovered Anna was pregnant, but they were not panicking then. Both were working, at the only sorts of jobs really available to young people in America�Anna at a Carl�s Jr., and Diego at a Panda Express. Diego actually had gotten a raise at Panda Express and was doing well.

�I was making pretty decent money there,� he says. �We were doing okay.� And though Anna had to ride on the bus for two hours in each direction to go to her job at Carl�s Jr., she was managing.

�We were able to pay our rent,� she says.

But then Panda Express downsized and Diego lost his job. And Anna, growing more and more visibly pregnant, was not going to be able to keep working the night shift at Carl�s Jr., with two-hour bus rides each way. So late in 2011, they made a fateful decision, to go on benefits, to help them at the very least through the birth of the baby.

Diego had immigration status because his mother had been the victim of extensive domestic violence. The Violence Against Women Act of 1994, signed into law by Bill Clinton, gave temporary immigration status to the victims of domestic violence, for the simple reason that in many immigrant households, abusive husbands prevent their wives and children from going through the naturalization process as a way of keeping power over them. (Selena, the house-cleaner, fell into that category.) So when the husband is removed from the home, his wife and children are given temporary status and immediately qualify for benefits.

Diego had had his U visa since 2006 and had qualified to receive his own benefits as an adult for two years, but he was only now applying, and he was only applying for food stamps. Anna, meanwhile, applied for the full CalWORKs package, which included cash aid and food stamps. They went into the Market Street FRC in December 2011, and initially everything seemed fine. �The woman was really nice,� Anna says. �We had no problems at all. She told us we qualified.�

You have to be so poor as to have nothing at all to qualify for welfare. In California, to qualify for benefits, you can�t have more than $2,000 in assets to your name. If you have a car, the car can�t be worth more than $3,000. The actual equation for income level in California is complicated, but put it this way: a hypothetical family of three, like Diego and Anna would soon be, cannot have a gross income of more than $714 a month and still qualify for CalWORKs. The math is too involved to list here, but if you�re getting benefits, you have to know those formulas like the back of your hand.

Why? Because when you apply for CalWORKs, they hand you a very involved application form, and this form becomes the legal bible by which you must live, on pain of prosecution. The CalWORKs cover sheet/application comes with a snappy little Orwellian logo at the top of the first page, a cutesy drawing of a small pile of dollar bills surrounded by the words:

quote:

WORK PAYS
In so many ways

quote:

The form goes on to give a summary of the benefits process (you receive a more detailed package of all the rules separately) and contains a lengthy passage about the consequences of lying to the state. You are reminded that you must attest to the veracity of everything you write and that you can be jailed for up to three years for lying about getting cash aid and up to twenty years for lying about food stamps (we will find, as we look at the frauds committed at banks and other such companies, that the penalties for fraud seem to increase as the amounts lost get smaller).

You�re also told, ominously, that if there is an overpayment, �you will have to pay it back even if the County made an error.�

You�re then asked to answer nineteen questions, which include things like �How much income does everyone, including children, get or will get this month?� (You find out at another part of the form that the words �You, anyone, everyone� in welfare applications all mean �any and all persons who live in your home.�) You�re asked if �your food will run out in three days�; you�re asked if you have an eviction notice �or notice to pay or quit.�

You fill out this form, and then at the bottom you sign your name to the following statement:

I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of America and the State of California that the information I have given on this form is true, correct, and complete.

And you keep signing those forms for as long as you have benefits. If you�re on any kind of public assistance, you have to fill out, every quarter, a form called a QR 7, or �Eligibility/Status Report.� In that form you have to attest to all the basic facts of your life�whom you live with, whether you have a car, where you work and how much you earn, and so on. And if any of that information doesn�t jibe with what the state knows or thinks it knows, you get started down the road to a fraud case.

In any case, Anna and Diego signed the form, went home, waited and waited for the P100 search (�A drag because you can�t go out and look for a job,� says Diego), made it through that, and appeared from there to be fine, receiving benefits at the end of the month, as expected.

The sum total of the benefits was $246 in cash for Anna, plus food stamps for both of them. As the New Year rolled around, they began to think they were going to be okay. Diego got another job at another fast food place, this time at Little Caesars (�No delivering�I�m making pizzas,� he says cheerfully), and they were already thinking about the time when they might be able to get off the benefits.

Then they got a letter in the mail.

Welfare applicants all talk in hushed tones about the dread of the mail system. Everyone in the California system has a monster collection of ominous little green forms, and to the last they all tell stories about getting a letter with good news one day that is contradicted by a new letter the next day accusing them of fraud.

This is what happened to Diego and Anna. Almost immediately after receiving their first month�s benefits, Anna got a letter saying that upon further review, the state had ruled that Diego had not been eligible to receive benefits. Therefore, the notice said, Anna�not Diego, but Anna�now owed the state $148 to compensate for the month of food stamps he had �improperly� received.

The state was wrong�Diego did qualify for the food stamps�but that didn�t matter. Recouping �erroneous� overpayments to welfare recipients has become a craze for states all over the country. In 2010 Barack Obama�s Department of Agriculture lifted a ten-year ban on collecting food stamp overpayments, and states all over the country went hog wild trying to recover lost monies.

For instance, in 2011, the state of Ohio�the same state that lost tens of millions in the early 2000s when its pension fund bought severely overpriced mortgage-backed securities from a Lehman Brothers banker named John Kasich, who would later become governor�tried to recoup some of its losses by sending out 22,000 notices to Ohioans seeking �overpayments� in either welfare or food stamps.

Many if not most of these �overpayments� were actually the state�s own errors, but they went as far back as 1986 anyway, seeking checks as small as $78. A sixty-four-year-old retired construction worker named Dave Jenkinson got a notice asking him to repay $248 for cash assistance he got in the 1980s; if he didn�t pay, it would be withheld from his paycheck.

�They blame me like it�s my fault,� says Jenkinson, who doesn�t even remember getting cash aid.

This, roughly, is the situation Anna and Diego found themselves in. They were told to pony up the cash or else the money would be withheld from their paychecks. More notices piled up that month. One, curiously, informed them that according to their calculations, Diego had earned more than seven hundred dollars in January.

Diego and Anna were flabbergasted. Diego had gotten just one paycheck from Little Caesars in January, and it was for only two days� work. �I made thirty-six dollars,� he laughs now.

In late January they went into the FRC to plead their case, one of ten different trips they would make to the office between December 2011 and March 2012. In the course of that meeting a bizarre incident took place. Diego saw that the caseworker had his photo ID on file; he asked for a copy of that document. The caseworker exploded.

�He got up and threw a pair of scissors down on the desk,� says Anna. �We had no idea what was going on.�

�He�s like, �How do I know that�s even you?� � says Diego. �Then he stormed out.�

Not surprisingly, nothing at that meeting got resolved. Oh, well; they at least still had Anna�s benefits. The couple dug in and tried to enjoy the last month before their first child was born. Meanwhile the notices kept coming in the mail, most still harping about that food stamp money. By March there would be more than twenty of them.

Then, two weeks before their first son, Jonah, was born, they got a bombshell in the mail. �I got a new notice,� says Anna. �It said I had received an overpayment. They said I had received five hundred sixteen dollars in cash aid. But I�d actually only received two hundred forty-six dollars. I had the stubs to prove it and everything.�

As a result of this �overpayment,� Anna was now permanently denied benefits. Both young people were pushed off the rolls because of errors made by the state. The total amount of �overpayment� was now perilously close to the four-hundred-dollar number that is generally considered the minimum threshold for the state to press a fraud case. As it was, the Alvarezes were going to be out at least that much money in taxes, which would be taken out of any future paychecks earned by Diego or (if and when she goes back to Carl�s Jr. or some other, closer workplace) Anna.

But according to the state, they�d also committed fraud at least three times: when Diego received benefits without qualifying for them, when Diego �lied� about his January income, and when Anna overcollected in cash aid without paying the money back.

The young couple are now in a permanent state of dread, never knowing when they might be dragged into another mess or charged with a crime. �I think about it a lot,� says Anna. �It�s on my mind all the time.� In addition to having an uphill climb just to keep food on the table every month, she and her husband are in a zone where one wrong number, one slip of the tongue, one computer error, can put you in legal jeopardy forever. �It�s literally dangerous to be poor,� says Halpern.

The couple�s only shot to fix things is to get a volunteer lawyer to help them sort it all out before it turns into a criminal case. And you have to sort it out now, because once prosecutors file in cases like this, it�s over.

�Welfare recipients are so unsympathetic that public defenders don�t even bother trying to fight the cases,� says Hilda Chan, a young lawyer who works with the poor in San Diego.

I found this out myself when I contacted the public defender�s office in one California county (not San Diego) and asked to speak to an attorney who handles welfare fraud cases. I was initially told there was no such person. When I countered that there had to be someone, given that I�d just been told by that county�s district attorney�s office that they processed thirty felony fraud cases a month, I was put on hold. When the receptionist came back, I was told that �we do of course handle welfare fraud cases, but that attorney is not in at the moment.�

While the country�s best and highest-paying legal jobs are the province of superstar corporate defense firms like Davis Polk and WilmerHale that routinely handle financial fraud cases�if you want to find a lawyer who�s defended a bank against an SEC fraud charge, you won�t have to go very far�it�s very difficult to find a lawyer, any lawyer, who has actually put up a defense in a welfare fraud case. They beg off them, find excuses to avoid them, and if they do get stuck with them, they plead them out. �Public defenders don�t want to take these cases,� says Kaaryn Gustafson, a professor at the University of Connecticut.

Meanwhile, one of the curious, and curiously stupid, features of the way welfare is administered in many states is that no single caseworker stays with any applicant�s case; each time the recipient interacts with the state, he deals with a new person. And each new person who looks at the file may interpret the facts differently. Thus Diego may qualify in the first caseworker�s eyes, but not in the second. A person can be in the CalWORKs program for years and never get to know any caseworker.

That virtually guarantees a few things. One is that no sympathetic relationship ever develops between client and caseworker, which politically is probably considered a good thing.

Two is that there�s an explosion of errors that are infinitely more difficult and more expensive to sort out than they would be if someone with personal knowledge of the case was involved from the jump. Now there�s an endless parade of Annas and Diegos and Markishas filing formal appeals with the state, explaining their whole life stories from the start in each meeting, instead of just calling a caseworker on the phone, reminding them of a fact or two, and having them change a number on a screen.

The system therefore clearly doesn�t really work for the state, either. It�s like opening a hospital where no doctor could ever see the same patient twice�the bureaucratic version of Memento, where the characters have to go back in time to re-create a whole universe of facts from the beginning in each new scene.

Lastly, minus the possibility for human interaction (or the satisfaction of seeing a client get back on his feet), the welfare caseworker�s job inevitably becomes a blistering hell of constant, irrational paperwork and seemingly inane requests from needy people. It�s no wonder that so many of them throw scissors and explode at their clients. You would, too, if that was your life every day.

In fact, the only creative component to the caseworker�s job in the current system is the investigative angle, which is not an accident. Since the great welfare reforms of the mid-1990s, when Bill Clinton broke up the traditional welfare state and introduced reforms like workfare and the end to permanent cash aid, the entire welfare apparatus has gone through a transformation, wherein thousands of people who were caseworkers previously became fraud investigators under the new system. �Sometimes, they even kept the same offices,� says Gustafson. �They would take a welfare caseworker, retrain him or her to be a fraud investigator, and put him or her back in the same desk.�

In many places (and San Diego is one such place), the welfare caseworkers and fraud investigators working for the DA�s office actually work out of the same building, wing, or office. �San Diego has satellite DA�s offices in the welfare offices,� says Gustafson. �People come in to talk to a caseworker, they have no idea they�re talking to a fraud investigator.�

To give an example of how many welfare workers have migrated to law enforcement in the post-Clinton era: in 2002, in just one California county (Santa Clara), the Board of Supervisors reassigned thirty-seven welfare caseworkers to new jobs as investigators. There are so many welfare fraud investigators now, they�re actually unionizing and bargaining collectively. They even have their own lobbyist organizations; in California, for instance, we now have the California Welfare Fraud Investigators Association, and similar organizations now exist in Nevada, New York, Ohio, Colorado, and numerous other states.

These associations have effectively lobbied for increased welfare fraud prosecution and investigation and have helped create a new cottage industry within government. Some states have actually increased funding for fraud investigation because the programs are paid for by federal funds they would lose if they weren�t spent�in other words, rather than lose funding because of reduced welfare rolls, states simply increase the amount of staff for welfare fraud investigation.

This results in mountains of fraud cases. At the end of 2007, for instance, there were more than 52,000 welfare fraud investigations pending in the state of California alone. That number is actually lower than it was in the late Clinton years, when the state of California paid counties a cash incentive to make welfare fraud cases�they were given 25 percent of any cash recovered. Between 2001 and 2007, the number of cases that actually went to court dropped by about half.

But the caseload is still huge. California counties like San Diego, Alameda, Riverside, Bayview, and others all file upward of forty or fifty cases a month, and in some cases as many as a hundred cases a month. These cases are often felony fraud cases, and DAs are hot for them because (a) they never, ever lose them and (b) it boosts their records. Fans of The Wire will connect to this dynamic: nothing quite jukes the stats like forty unopposed felony convictions a month. �DAs love these cases,� says Gustafson. �It raises their profiles before elections.�

So how does a numerical glitch like any of the ones in Diego and Anna�s case turn into a criminal charge? It happens in dozens of ways. A caseworker at an FRC sees an applicant leaving in a nice car, a P100 investigator sees those Victoria�s Secret panties, or, very often, a neighbor calls in with a tip, sometimes for a cash reward. Beyond that, the state has computers scanning countless different databases�phone and utility bills, school registration, birth certificates, leases, voter registration, the DMV, tax data, unemployment compensation, and on and on�that can uncover discrepancies. The recipient is then sent a notice and asked to come in to speak to a fraud investigator.

In some parts of California, welfare recipients when they first walk into that initial meeting are asked to sign what is called a disqualification consent agreement. The form reads as follows:

(1) [T]he accused understands the consequences of the signed consent agreement;
(2) consenting to the disqualification will result in a reduction in benefits for the disqualification period;
(3) the actual disqualification penalty to be imposed; and
(4) any remaining members of the [family] may be held liable for any overpayments that the accused has not already repaid.

Many people who sign this form do so thinking that they will simply be asked to pay money back, and they have no idea that it could be used as the basis of a criminal prosecution. They walk into these offices and not only sign away their benefits, they talk themselves right into jail.

And that�s the last thing that people need to understand about these cases: people really go to real jail behind this madness. It happens casually and effortlessly. And quickly. If you follow white-collar fraud cases like the federal government�s halfhearted investigation of Goldman Sachs executive Fabrice Tourre, accused of helping a hedge fund billionaire named John Paulson defraud a pair of European banks out of over a billion dollars, you see that these cases move at the speed of a molasses spill. Motions and counter-motions drag cases out for years and years.

While writing this book, I covered a trial, USA v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, that involved the rigging of municipal bond auctions by a trio of GE Capital executives. The government had the crimes of all the defendants on tape (the companies taped themselves), and none of the defendants had anything like a credible defense for crimes that collectively cost states many millions of dollars. Yet not one of the accused saw the inside of a jail cell for nearly fifteen years (the offenses dated back as far as 1999), and even after all three were convicted and handed down multiyear sentences, they were eventually freed by a judge who essentially punished prosecutors for missing the statute of limitations for filing charges.

High-finance fraud cases are drawn out for dozens of reasons, including the obfuscatory efforts of superior defense lawyers and the overwhelming complexity of the crimes.

But welfare fraud? These cases can be generated in the blink of an eye, often because a family member or a neighbor simply decided to pick up the telephone. �No one can snitch you off like your ex or your ex�s girlfriend or your neighbor or your landlord,� says one former California district attorney whose county in the late 1990s processed more than a hundred fraud cases a month.

Gustafson, the professor, recalls interviewing a single father named Jerome for a study she was doing on how well welfare recipients understand the rules. Jerome was raising his toddler son by himself. Why? Because back when he was living with the child�s mother and her sister, the sister didn�t like him and called the welfare office to snitch him out, hoping that authorities would kick him out of the house. But the consequence of that decision was that the authorities busted not Jerome, but the mother, for not registering Jerome as a resident in the home. The mother ended up doing a year in jail. Jerome and his son now rent out a room in a converted garage.

The ad in the Riverside, California, Press-Enterprise is of the big banner variety, nicely placed in the Sunday edition�at four columns square, it�s a nice size, too, costing a thousand bucks to publish. The message is simple: the government of Riverside County, California�a politically conservative, mostly affluent region east of Los Angeles that extends to the Arizona border and includes the resort town of Palm Springs�is looking for whistle-blowers to aid the state in making fraud cases.

What kinds of fraud cases? Big cases? Well, not exactly. The ad reads:

$100 REWARD
OFFERED BY RIVERSIDE COUNTY DEPT. OF PUBLIC SOCIAL SERVICES

Dockets of the Riverside County Court System show the following persons were convicted of welfare fraud on the dates specified:

And then the ad goes on to list the names and conviction dates of six persons convicted of improperly receiving benefits. The government of Riverside County, California, essentially puts the heads of six welfare cheats on pikes and plants them in the public square once a month, to send a message to the community. �Yeah, shaming is definitely part of the motivation,� sighs Philip Robb, a former prosecutor from neighboring San Bernardino County, now engaged in a (to date unsuccessful) campaign against the ads.

Month after month, Riverside County runs the same ad and picks six new names each month to advertise. Like welfare recipients in general, the guilty are overwhelmingly female, and usually nonwhite. �They don�t do this to rapists or murderers,� says Robb. �Not even to pedophiles. It�s incredible.�

No, the only offenders the local burghers will spend money to embarrass publicly are young, single, nonwhite mothers guilty of the crime of improperly receiving benefits. And as we�ve seen, it�s a stretch to assume that they�re all really guilty. The one thing we do know is that the people on this list every month are all flat broke and incapable of hiring a decent lawyer�and who knows, the fancy folk in Palm Springs might have an interest in shaming these people for that crime, as well.

All of this goes back to Bill Clinton. It�s not a coincidence that radical welfare reform took place on the same watch that also saw a radical deregulation of the financial services industry. Clinton was a man born with a keen nose for two things: women with low self-esteem and political opportunity. When he was in the middle of a tough primary fight in 1992 and came out with a speech promising to �end welfare as we know it,� he could immediately smell the political possibilities, and it wasn�t long before this was a major plank in his convention speech (and soon in his first State of the Union address).

Clinton understood that putting the Democrats back in the business of banging on black dependency would allow his party to reseize the political middle that Democrats had lost when Lyndon Johnson threw the weight of the White House behind the civil rights effort and the War on Poverty.

If you dig deeply enough in America, the big political swings always have something to do with race. And Clinton�s vacillating but cleverly packaged campaign to �end welfare as we know it� was a brilliant ploy by the man Toni Morrison called the �first black president� to take back the southern white voters the Democrats had seemingly lost forever when they sent the FBI into Alabama and Mississippi in the 1960s. That, and a little rolled-up-newspaper training session with rapper Sister Souljah, allowed Clinton to take four of the eleven Confederate states, seizing ground no Democrat had won for more than two decades.

But Clinton didn�t just go after Republican votes. He went after the Republicans� money, too. He brought in a team of economic advisers who offered what was, for the Democrats, a bold new approach on the economy, an approach based upon balancing the budget on the one hand and deregulating Wall Street on the other.

In the wake of the 2008 crisis, Clinton is most frequently criticized for overseeing two radical changes to our regulatory structure: the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to allow the mergers of investment banks, commercial banks, and insurance companies, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which deregulated the burgeoning derivatives market. Less commonly understood is that Clinton, Greenspan, Rubin, and Summers also oversaw the collapse of what are known as �selective credit controls,� the tools used to rein in irresponsible lending.

Rules like the Federal Reserve�s Regulations X and W, which mandated minimum down payments for things like home and automobile loans, were watered down if not eliminated completely during the Clinton years, and regulators under Clinton likewise refused to insist that banks and financial companies at least jack up their reserve capital to match all the crazy lending they were doing. At a critical juncture in 1993, for instance, Clinton�s SEC considered a proposal to raise capital requirements in the (then little known) derivatives market, but ultimately decided against it.

The cumulative effect of all this was an explosion of easy credit for the financial services sector, wedded to an across-the-board relaxation of economic regulations. Staffs were cut at all the major regulatory agencies, and banking watchdogs like the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision simply stopped pursuing criminal investigations; groups that had referred thousands of cases a year to the Justice Department for prosecution during the S&L crisis completely stopped that activity by the turn of the millennium. In 2009 the OCC referred zero cases for prosecution.

On the other hand, welfare fraud was prosecuted like never before, and welfare fraud investigators multiplied like rats in every state of the country, forming unions and lobbying agencies.

Bill Clinton�s political formula for seizing the presidency was simple. He made money tight in the ghettos and let it flow free on Wall Street. He showered the projects with cops and bean counters and pulled the cops off the beat in the financial services sector. And in one place he created vast new mountain ranges of paperwork, while in another, paperwork simply vanished.

After Clinton, just to get food stamps to buy potatoes and flour, you suddenly had to hand in a detailed financial history dating back years, submit to wholesale invasions of privacy, and give in to a range of humiliating conditions. Meanwhile banks in the 1990s were increasingly encouraged to lend and speculate without filling out any paperwork at all, and eventually borrowers were freed of the burden of even having to show proof of income when they took out mortgages or car loans.

Clinton�s �third way� political strategy, in which Democrats laid down their arms of business regulation, allowed his party to compete with the Republicans for the campaign contributions of the big banks on Wall Street. By 1996, Bill Clinton�s single biggest private campaign contributor would be Goldman Sachs, a distinction he would share with the next Democratic president, Barack Obama. The other side of the new strategy also stole the Republicans� political thunder by preemptively bashing black dependency through the welfare issue, allowing Democrats to sink their fangs into a big chunk of Richard Nixon�s �Southern strategy� based on white voters in the South.

This was canny politics for the Democratic Party, but it had an obvious consequence�a consensus. Now the political momentum in both parties traveled in the same direction. Both parties wanted to merge the social welfare system with law enforcement, creating a world that for the poor would be peopled everywhere by cops and bureaucrats and inane, humiliating rules. They wanted to put all the sharp edges of American life in that one arena, and they succeeded.

And on the other hand, both parties wanted the financial services sector to become an endless naked pillow fight, fueled by increasingly limitless amounts of cheap cash from the Federal Reserve (literally free cash, eventually). If they turned life in the projects into a police state, they turned life on Wall Street into its opposite. One lie in San Diego is a crime. But a million lies? That�s just good business.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2017 20:57

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

The Divide is one of the most infuriating books I've read in my life. I'm like 10% away from finishing it and I keep having to put it down because jesus loving christ

# ¿ Dec 30, 2017 20:58

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

TheDon01 posted:

Just started reading Lucifers Hammer. No real reason other than I like Sci-fi, seen it on a bunch of lists and it was super cheap at the bookstore.

Any of you guys read it? Yea? Nay?

what's it about

i like satan and I also like sci fi

# ¿ Jan 5, 2018 08:50

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

I finally finished The Divide

gently caress that book and gently caress this country. America is immoral

I'm going to read fiction for the next month or so. Starting with Steven Saylor's A Murder on the Appian Way, historical murder mystery about the death of Publius Clodius Pulcher, right during the Republic collapse

# ¿ Jan 5, 2018 19:26

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

And the very last excerpt I'll post from The Divide before I delete this cursed file from my Kindle.

I won't bold anything. Read it through if you're white.

Matt Taibbi, the Divide posted:

On the morning of March 23, 2011, a young white saxophonist and music teacher named Patrick Jewell woke up in Brooklyn in a good mood.

Everything in his life was moving in the right direction. A few months earlier, he�d met a girl and fallen in love. Just that morning, as per their brand-new routine, he�d made her breakfast and walked her from her Brooklyn apartment to the subway stop on Marcy Avenue, where she left every morning to go to work in Manhattan. He watched her walk up the stairs to the elevated subway platform, leaned up against the stairs on street level, carefully rolled a cigarette of American Spirit pouch tobacco (in New York, where cigarette taxes are through the roof, rolling your own saves about four dollars a pack), and smiled. Life was good.

Patrick was born in the heart of Bible-belt Kentucky�two hours south of Lexington. �In a dry county surrounded by eight other dry counties,� he says. He�d come to New York a few years before from Los Angeles, where he�d gotten a master�s degree in jazz studies at the California Institute of the Arts.

Slightly built, bearded, likely to be dressed in a porkpie hat and clothes that are mellow and vintage, Patrick looks like what he is, a musical ascetic and a gentle soul. He�s a vegetarian who once went on a five-day seminar with the Dalai Lama to study compassionate living, a person who does cancer walks and studies tai chi and meditation. He volunteers at a homeless shelter. He describes his outlook on life as �Buddhish.� Staying in Southern California probably would have suited him just fine.

But after finishing school in L.A. and beginning a career taking on students to put food on the table, things quickly got tight. The 2008 financial crash forced the move. �People there don�t stop driving BMWs and living in big houses when they lose money,� he says, laughing. �What they do is stop sending their kids to music lessons.�

So in the summer of 2009, when he started to become even more broke than usual, he and about twenty of his musician friends packed up and made an exodus to New York, the city of Birdland and the Blue Note, to try to make it there.

They didn�t have a lot of money, so they found a house in the one place they could afford: Bedford-Stuyvesant, living just a few avenues away from the war zone where Andrew Brown had lived his whole life. A racially mixed mobile commune of California musicians wasn�t the usual resident profile for Bed-Stuy, but they made it work. He would eventually move south to the less-imposing Lefferts Gardens area of Brooklyn, but some of his friends stayed in and around the old house in Bed-Stuy. One night he was back in that neighborhood when he met a girl who had moved in with some of his old friends.

Her name was Lauren, and she was about ten years younger than he was (Patrick was thirty-two by then), but they took to each other immediately. They started making plans to live together. All that was missing was a steady job, and by March 2011, even that was coming around. He had just gotten a gig teaching nine- and ten-year-olds at after-school band practices for the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music.

Patrick had no formal background in teaching so many different instruments. He�d spent his whole college and postgrad career studying to be a sax performer. But he�d learned how to do it in California the hard way. �Basically, I had to take an old trumpet home and kind of had to learn �Mary Had a Little Lamb,� man,� he says.

He was performing occasionally at some clubs in Manhattan, he was working on an album, he had a new job, and he didn�t know it yet, but he�d just met the girl he was going to marry someday. Life was good. He had no reason not to stop and take it all in on the steps of the Marcy Avenue subway station over a rolled cigarette, early on the morning of March 23, 2011.

Suddenly, someone grabbed him by the arm.

�He was a short, stocky Hispanic guy, dressed in a black leather jacket, boots, and jeans,� Patrick says. �And I think he had a black fleece pullover.�

The man grabbed him and dragged him toward a brick wall.

�He said, �Come here, I want to talk to you,� � he recalls. Patrick shakes his head as he retells the story. �And I�m like a meek guy, and he�s a big, football-player-type guy.�

The man was looking back and forth as he pushed Patrick up against a wall. He leaned up close to Patrick�s face and yelled at him: �What the gently caress do you think you�re doing here?�

Patrick is not a New Yorker. He had no experience here. He�d obviously been warned that he was hanging out in a dangerous neighborhood, but this was broad daylight, the morning, next to a subway station entrance.

�What?� Patrick said in response. �What do you mean?�

�What the gently caress do you think you�re doing here?� the man repeated.

Then, �out of nowhere,� Patrick recounts, two more men arrived. They were both stocky guys, wearing the same kind of getup: boots, jeans, leather jackets. They surrounded Patrick.

By this time, Patrick was convinced he was being robbed. He reached to his pocket, to get out whatever money he had. �Look,� he said, the panic in his voice rising, �I�ve got about ten dollars��

The first man swatted Patrick�s hand away. �Don�t you put your loving hand in your pocket!� he screamed, pushing Patrick up against the wall really hard.

Now Patrick�s mind was racing. If they didn�t want money, what did they want? �Was I just about to get beaten up, or what?� he says. �I didn�t know.� He quickly looked around and saw a couple of people on the street. Plus, across the street, there was a brand-new apartment building, and he could see through the glass of the first floor a bunch of Hasidic women and their children.

�Help me!� Patrick screamed. �Help! Help!�

Nobody helped.

He screamed toward the Hasidic women in particular: Help me, call the cops!

Nothing.

At this point, one of the three men pulled out a set of handcuffs. Patrick involuntarily flashed to a movie he had just seen days before, the absurd Liam Neeson B thriller Taken, and all he could think about was the strange plot about a young person being kidnapped and sold overseas into white slavery. He also suddenly remembered being on tour in Brazil and hearing stories about people being kidnapped for their organs.

�To me, something bad was going to happen,� he says. �I thought a van would pull up, someone would throw me in it, and nobody would ever know what happened to me. My kidneys will be on eBay.�

Patrick gamely tried to flee. The three men chased after him and knocked him to the ground. One of them reached under his shirt and pulled out a �badge,� but the badge was turned around, so all Patrick could see was the clasp pin on the reverse side of a piece of metal, a flimsy thing that made the whole contraption look homemade.

�To me, it looked like a safety pin,� Patrick says. �I thought, �That poo poo�s fake.� And I thought, �If these guys have a fake badge, then they�re some kind of professionals.� So I got up and tried to run away.�

They tackled him again and began slamming his head against the sidewalk. They hit him repeatedly, and blood started spouting from his head.

Patrick managed to get up once or twice, preventing them from getting the second hand in cuffs. They had cuffed one hand by then. But finally he was tackled for the last time and put in a headlock by his first attacker. He heard the man say, �Don�t resist, it�ll be bad.� Then Patrick blacked out, or semi�blacked out.

His next memory is sitting on the street, up against a wall, Indian style, his hands cuffed. And he saw a police car coming up. A uniformed cop popped out of the car, came up to him. Patrick had been crying, out of terror before, but now out of relief.

�Oh, my God,� he said, almost in a begging tone. �Thank God you�re here, thank God you�re here. Help me! These guys, they were acting like cops��

The uniform cop leaned down to Patrick.

�Shut the gently caress up,� he said.

Patrick nearly passed out in shock. It was the first time it had ever even occurred to him that his attackers might actually have been police. Now he realized, with a cold shiver, that he was in really serious trouble, though he didn�t know why.

The uniformed officer looked at the three attackers�undercover officers, Patrick now realized�and said, �You guys got this?�

Yeah, we got this, they said.

The uniform walked down the street, leaving Patrick with his original attackers. From there, they started in on him. They picked him up, took his hat off, threw the hat on the ground, then started searching his pockets, tossing each item into the hat. They found the pouch of rolling tobacco. Then they looked on the ground and found the rolled cigarette Patrick had been smoking and pulled it apart�all tobacco.

Undercover #1: �This wasn�t it, right?�

Undercover #2: �No, that wasn�t it.�

They threw the cigarette on the ground. Then the second man made a show of walking over toward the subway station entrance, reaching down to the space between the station entrance and the street, and �picking up� a third object. In fact, Patrick saw, he took the thing out of his pocket, rather than picking it up off the street.

He tossed it into the hat.

The uniform came back from down the street. Patrick shouted at him, �They�re trying to frame me! Do something!�

The uniform looked back at him with expressionless eyes. �Why don�t you try to be a loving man?� he said.

Patrick squirmed over toward the hat close enough to see that there was a sort of pill bottle in it now, with something inside. It would later turn out that the object inside the bottle was an empty vial of what had once been crack.

Patrick would spend much of the next years turning over the absurdity of the situation in his head. Who carries around an empty crack vial? �Was I going to get free refills?� he asks now.

The next thing he knew, a marked police van showed up. They threw him in there, handcuffed tightly, and as the van pulled away, Patrick started to lose the feeling in his fingers.

A new sort of panic came over him. He was a professional saxophonist; neurological damage to his fingers could ruin his life permanently. He started kicking and screaming.

Finally the cop driving the van stopped, came around to the back, and opened the door. �I�m going to open these cuffs up a little bit,� he said. �But if you yell one more time, I�m going to put you in the hospital.�

In the van, the undercovers started going through Patrick�s phone. They found texts from Lauren. They started asking questions. �What are you doing down here?� they asked.

Patrick�s father, a country lawyer in Kentucky, would later admonish his son for opening his mouth at all during this sequence.

But Patrick answered, �My girl lives down here.�

�Oh, yeah?� said one, almost accusatorily. �What, are you dating a sister?�

�No,� Patrick said. �She just moved here from Michigan.��

�Really?� said one of them. �What�s her address? We�ll go check on her sometime, if you like. We�ll go check and see how she�s doing.�

Patrick froze. �No. That�s okay, I�m fine.�

They took him back to a precinct house and threw him into a cell, where he waited by himself. He yelled: What�s going on?

Finally, the first undercover, the man who attacked him, came into the cell and started talking. �I know what you�re doing,� he said. �You�re screaming so you can get out of this. But we got you.�

Patrick, genuinely confused, looked back. �Man, what did you get me for? I have no idea what I�ve been arrested for. Please, just tell me what I�ve been arrested for.�

�Buddy,� he said, �we�ve got you for everything.�

Everything?

�We got you for crack. We got you for weed. And you reached for my belt. That�s a felony. You�re going to jail for three to six.�

He left Patrick to stew on that for a few more hours. Finally they transferred him to central booking.

�It was like a truck stop bathroom, with forty of your closest friends,� he says. He stayed there for twenty-four hours, during which time he was fingerprinted and photographed. A million things went through his mind. He spoke to his father by phone, who got him a private lawyer, who in turn got him arraigned and out of there.

During the whole time he was in jail, everyone Patrick spoke to�police, other prisoners, even his own lawyer�said exactly the same thing to him. They told him not to worry, it�d be fine, but that they just �had to run him through the system.�

Nobody so much as batted an eyelid about what had happened. This was just a thing that went on�he just had to go through the motions now and not get emotional about it. In fact, the number-one reaction he got from everyone he appealed to during this time was annoyance that he was making a big deal about it. Take your charge, take your medicine, and shut the hell up.

�The casualness of it was what got me,� he says now. �Everybody was acting the same way, like it was no big deal.�

When Patrick was being photographed, he saw that the original charges were possession of a controlled substance, possession of marijuana, and resisting. By the time he was arraigned, the marijuana charge had been dropped, replaced by a tampering-with-evidence charge.

A few weeks later Patrick went back to court, and the judge immediately gave him an ACD, meaning the whole thing would go away, provided he didn�t get �in trouble� again in the next six months. Under the circumstances even an ACD was monstrous, but it was the best possible outcome in a system that�s designed to arrest and detain first, then sort out the crime later.

Patrick was never the same after that incident.

Almost immediately after it happened, he started having nightmares. He�d wake up in the middle of the night, ready to defend himself against attack. He�d leap out of bed, physically jumping up.

Or he�d have panic attacks, long periods of near-total paralysis, heart racing, anxiety through the roof. And even when he was fine, the panic attacks would sometimes take so much out of him, he�d be too drained to be fully functional.

�A good friend would be telling me something really important to him,� he says, �and I would just be like, �Uh-huh.� I couldn�t be the way I wanted to be with people. I stopped going out, which doesn�t sound like much, but for a musician, networking is kind of important.

�I started going to therapy. And I found out that what I was experiencing was post-traumatic stress disorder.�

Patrick in person seems strong, pleasant, and put together, a mature, responsible young man about to get married, his life still going on.

But he�s had something taken from him. He seems like the kind of person who wants to be a peaceful, positive presence in everyone�s life, but he can�t be that to everyone anymore, not always anyway, and it obviously troubles him. �The weird thing is, it�s not like I�m angry at the cops,� he says. �It�ll come out in an argument with my girlfriend, or at the guy who cut in line in front of me a little while ago.�

He shakes his head. �It changed my life forever.�

A collateral consequence, but this is the kind we�ve decided we can live with.

Of course this reads like a shocker story only because Patrick Jewell is a white, college-educated musician. Imagine the same story a few hundred thousand times over, and you�re starting to plug into the ordinary urban nonwhite experience. And that, too, is a collateral consequence we�ve decided we can live with.

Patrick Jewell most likely was some plainclothes policeman�s fleeting visual error�a rolled cigarette mistaken from a distance as a joint. But instead of simply walking up to him and asking him what he was smoking, law enforcement�s first move was to assault him, then frame him, toss him in jail, and run him all the way through the system without apology, rather than admit the mistake.

Patrick�s arrest was the essence of stop-and-frisk, which itself was the perfect symbol of the new stats-based approach to city policing. You throw a big net over a whole city region, bounce some heads off sidewalks, then throw back the little fish. Almost as important (and this aspect of it is little discussed), you gather intelligence with each catch.

The thing is, this particular ocean, to push the metaphor a bit further, is getting overfished. So they�re trawling more remote waters, the nets being cast are wider. Which is a fancy way of saying that it�s not just blacks from Bed-Stuy or Hispanic workers in rural Georgia or Mexican single moms living out of vans who are getting the treatment.

Being white and middle class never meant your kids breezed into Yale with a C average. That kind of privilege was always reserved for a special kind of wealth. But it did once mean that police would think twice before bouncing your head off a sidewalk. Not anymore.

Matt Taibbi, the Divide posted:

There are thousands of other things at work here, but the last straw in every great social tragedy is always something absurd like this, like the nation�s top law enforcement officials unable to spot the greatest crime wave of a generation, because they can�t see the victims from their offices.

The problem is, if the law is applied unequally enough over a long enough period of time, at some point, law enforcement becomes politically illegitimate. Whole classes of arrests become (circle one) illegal, improper, morally unenforceable.

We have to be really close to that point now. Too many of the same damning themes keep jumping out.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2018 18:43

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

Helsing posted:

Every excerpt from The Divide that I'm seeing posted here seems really good and I'm tempted to buy the book. However, I'm not a huge fan of long-form journalism that leans too heavily on first person narration. In the past I've struggled to get into Taibbi's writing because so many of the sentences start with "I", "I went here, I saw this, I did that, I spoke to X, I spoke to Y" etc. Can anyone comment on how The Divide is written? If I opened a copy of the book and flipped to a random page how likely would it be that the first thing I'd read would be a paragraph started with "I"?

Taibbi does use it but primarily as a transition tool. I can think of 3-4 instances in the book where he uses it to transition away from a chapter into the next topic. The biggest part is when he goes to a courthouse to see how the sausage is made, and that's about.. 30 or 40 pages or so? Hard to estimate page count on the Kindle.

Most of the book is him conveying experiences from people who've been screwed by the system, like Patrick Jewell above or the deported people from earlier in the thread, or writing about financial crimes (in the third person).

For what it's worth, I'm kind of picky about my writers. Taibbi's writing isn't great but it's unobstructive and lets me focus on the content of what he's writing about.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2018 20:12

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

I'm about halfway through A Murder on the Appian Way and while I more or less like it, I'm a little annoyed that this just seems to be mostly a vehicle for educating me on the political chaos during the fall of the Roman republic before Caesar seized power. So far the protagonist has met Clodius, Cicero, Milo, Marc Antony, Pompey and I'm sure Caesar will show up at some point. The investigation/mystery is about to pick up in earnest so maybe the infodump phase is over.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2018 23:00

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

An interesting passage that jumped out at me in A Murder on the Appian Way when Gordianus and his son Eco are captured and imprisoned in a hole for forty (or thirty-seven) days... Especially in light of the book I just finished (The Divide) I thought this was an interesting argument against incarceration:

Steven Saylor, A Murder on the Appian Way posted:

Our captivity was indeed maddening, and the hardest thing I ever had to endure. There is something in the spirit of a Roman that cannot acquiesce to such an unnatural condition. In other lands, where kings rule, imprisonment is a common punishment. This is because a king wishes to see his enemies suffer. What better way than to lock them in a cage or throw them into a pit where he can watch their inevitable physical and mental decline, tell them about the suffering of their loved ones outside, listen to their pleas for mercy and taunt them with false promises of release? But in our Republic, punishment is not designed to bring pleasure to a given ruler; it is meant to permanently remove an offender from the community, either by killing him (sometimes, admittedly, with rather gruesome punishments involved, especially for religious crimes) or by allowing him to choose exile instead of death. The notion that anyone should be indefinitely locked away, even for the most horrible crime, is too cruel even for Roman tastes.

I remembered the debate which took place in the Senate when Cicero was consul and announced he had uncovered a conspiracy by Catilina's circle to bring down the state. Cicero wanted them executed on the spot. Others disagreed, and it was Caesar who had suggested that those involved be rounded up and placed under permanent arrest. Against this novel idea was the practical problem of where such alleged criminals were to be incarcerated, since Rome has no prison to speak of, only a few small holding cells where malefactors are kept for a short while to await execution. There was also the danger of establishing a precedent for lengthy imprisonments, for once the state was allowed to take away a citizen's freedom of movement, where would such a course lead? Surely implicit in the very concept of citizenship was an individual's right to come and go as he wished, unlike a slave; if an individual had done something so terrible that he should no longer have the most basic right of a citizen, then surely he deserved either exile or death.

In the end, of course, Cicero had prevailed. The alleged conspirators (including Marc Antony's stepfather) had been rounded up and strangled to death without a trial. Many disagreed, later if not at the time, and their anger, harnessed by Clodius, eventually led to Cicero's exile for sixteen months. But even his worst enemies had never proposed that Cicero should be put into a prison, like a slavish courtier who had offended a monarch.

I think that as the world has grown smaller and smaller, and the population larger and ever-larger, exile has become less and less feasible as a solution, until we arrived at the point where if a citizen was a criminal in one jurisdiction then he would be considered a danger anywhere else, so better to incarcerate him as punishment instead of offload the problem onto somewhere else. There was also a much smaller emphasis on the whole "arc of life" deal, so it'd be preferable to just be executed and have it done and finished, instead of rotting in a dark pit, beyond miserable and slowly going insane, for decades.

Of course, restorative and rehabilitative justice is better than punitive, but Gordianus's Rome would still be a couple millennia away from that.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2018 02:14

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

I liked A Murder on the Appian Way enough that I decided to read through the rest of Roma Sub Rosa. The first book (Roman Blood, about Cicero's first case as an orator) is surprisingly richer in detail, character, and setting than than Murder was, which at times felt like I was receiving a history lesson.

Wonder if Saylor had gotten to the point where he was just cranking out books or if Murder was an outlier or something.

No particular hurry to get back to nonfiction and political poo poo, so I'll probably be on the RSR kick for several more weeks.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2018 23:55

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

I loaded all the earthsea books onto my Kindle

should I read the short stories before or after the main series?

# ¿ Jan 24, 2018 05:33

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

https://twitter.com/belledejour_uk/status/956187596215926785

# ¿ Jan 25, 2018 00:34

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

finishing up Roman Blood before I start on the Le Guin stuff. I'm finding it interesting how much more I'm liking Saylor's writing in this book, compared to A Murder on the Appian Way which felt dry and matter-of-fact at many times. I floated the idea before that Saylor was churning out books (he wrote about a dozen books total in this series), but I'm also wondering if part of this isn't that Saylor was much younger when he wrote Roman Blood, and as well he also had additional time to write over the book compared to having to write it on a deadline. Anyway, here's a passage I quite liked from the chapter introducing us to a 26-year-old Cicero, who's as of yet unfamiliar with life as a pleb...

Steven Saylor, Roman Blood posted:

'You were about to tell me something of how one goes about arranging a murder in the streets of Rome. Forgive me if the question is presumptuous. I don't mean to imply that you yourself have ever offended the gods by taking part in such crimes. But they say � Hortensius says � that you happen to know more than a little about these matters. Who, how, and how much�'

I shrugged. 'If a man wants another man murdered, there's nothing so difficult about that. As I said, a word to the right man, a bit of gold passed from hand to hand, and the job is done.'

'But where does one find the right man?'

I had been forgetting how young and inexperienced he was, despite his education and wit. 'It's easier than you might think. For years the gangs have been controlling the streets of Rome after dark, and sometimes even in broad daylight.'

'But the gangs fight each other.'

"The gangs fight anyone who gets in their way.'

'Their crimes are political. They ally themselves with a particular party�'

'They have no politics, except the politics of whatever man hires them. And no loyalty, except the loyalty that money buys. Think, Cicero. Where do the gangs come from? Some of them are spawned right here in Rome, like maggots under a rock � the poor, the children of the poor, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Whole dynasties of crime, generations of villains breeding pedigrees of vice. They negotiate with one another like little nations. They intermarry like noble families. And they hire themselves out like mercenaries to whatever politician or general offers the grandest promises.'

Cicero glanced away, peering into the translucent folds of the yellow curtain, as if he could see beyond it all the human refuse of Rome. 'Where do they all come from?' he muttered.

'They grow up through the pavement,' I said, 'like weeds. Or they drift in from the countryside, refugees from war after war. Think about it: Sulla wins his war against the rebellious Italian allies and pays his soldiers in land. But to acquire that land, the defeated allies must first be uprooted. Where do they end up, except as beggars and slaves in Rome? And all for what? The countryside is devastated by war. The soldiers know nothing of farming; in a month or a year they sell their holdings to the highest bidder and head back to the city. The countryside falls into the grip of vast landholders. Small farmers struggle to compete, are defeated and dispossessed � they find their way to Rome. More and more I've seen it in my own lifetime, the gulf between the rich and poor, the smallness of the one, the vastness of the other. Rome is like a woman of fabulous wealth and beauty, draped in gold and festooned with jewels, her belly big with a foetus named Empire � and infested from head to foot by a million scampering lice.'

Cicero frowned. 'Hortensius warned me that you would talk politics.'

'Only because politics is the air we breathe � I inhale a breath, and what else could come out? It may be otherwise in other cities, but not in the Republic, and not in our lifetimes. Call it politics, call it reality. The gangs exist for a reason. No one can get rid of them. Everyone fears them. A man bent on murder would find a way to use them. He'd only be following the example of a successful politician.'

'You mean�'

'I don't mean any particular politician. They all use the gangs, or try to.'

'But you mean Sulla.'

Cicero spoke the name first. I was surprised. I was impressed. At some point the conversation had slipped out of control. It was quickly turning seditious.

'Yes,' I said 'If you insist: Sulla.' I looked away. My eyes fell on the yellow curtain. I found myself gazing at it and into it, as if in the vagueness of the shapes beyond I could make out the images of an old nightmare. 'Were you in Rome when the proscriptions began?'

Cicero nodded.

'So was I. Then you know what it was like. Each day the new list of the proscribed would be posted in the Forum. And who were always first in line to read the names? No, not anyone who might have been on the list, because they were all cowering at home, or wisely barricaded in the countryside. First in line were the gangs and their leaders � because Sulla didn't care who destroyed his enemies, or his imagined enemies, so long as they were destroyed. Show up with the head of a proscribed man slung over your shoulder, sign a receipt, and receive a bag of silver in exchange. To acquire that head, stop at nothing. Break down the doors of a citizen's house. Beat his children, rape his wife � but leave his valuables in place, for once head and body are parted, the property of a proscribed Roman becomes the property of Sulla.'

'Not exactly�'

'I misspoke, of course. I meant to say that when an enemy of the state is beheaded, his estate is confiscated and becomes property of the state � meaning that it will be auctioned at the earliest convenient date at insanely low prices to Sulla's friends.'

Even Cicero blanched at this. He concealed his agitation well, but I noticed his eyes shift for the briefest instant from side to side, as if he were wary of spies concealed among the scrolls. �You're a man of strong opinions, Gordianus. The heat loosens your tongue. But what has any of this to do with the subject at hand?'

I had to laugh. 'And what is the subject? I think I've forgotten.'

'Arranging a murder,' Cicero snapped, sounding for all the world like a teacher of oratory attempting to steer an unruly pupil back to the prescribed topic. 'A murder of purely personal motive.'

�Well, then, I'm only trying to point out how easy it is these days to find a willing assassin. And not only in the Subura. Look on any street corner � yes, even this one. I'd gladly wager that I could leave your door, walk around the block exactly once, and return with a newfound friend more than willing to murder my pleasure-loving, whoremongering, hypothetical father.'

'You go too far, Gordianus. Had you been trained in rhetoric, you'd know the limits of hyperbole.'

'I don't exaggerate. The gangs have grown that bold. It's Sulla's fault and no one else's. He made them his personal bounty hunters.

He unleashed them to run wild across Rome, like packs of wolves. Until the proscriptions officially ended last year, the gangs had almost unlimited power to hunt and kill. So they bring in the head of an innocent man, a man who's not on the list � so what? Accidents happen. Add his name to the list of the proscribed. The dead man becomes a retroactive enemy of the state. What matter if that means his family will be disinherited, his children ruined and reduced to paupers, fresh fodder for the gangs? It also means that some friend of Sulla's will acquire a new house in the city.'

Cicero looked as if a bad tooth were worrying him. He raised his hand to silence me. I raised my own hand to stave him off.

'I'm only now reaching my point. You see, it wasn't only the rich and powerful who suffered during the proscriptions, and still suffer. Once Pandora's box is opened, no one can close it. Crime becomes habit. The unthinkable becomes commonplace. You don't see it from here, where you live. This street is too narrow, too quiet. No weeds grow through the paving stones that run by your door. Oh, no doubt, in the worst of it, you had a few neighbours dragged from their homes in the middle of the night. Perhaps you have a view of the Forum from the roof and on a clear day you might have counted the new heads added to the pikes.

'But I see a different Rome, Cicero, that other Rome that Sulla has left to posterity. They say he plans to retire soon, leaving behind him a new constitution to strengthen the upper classes and put the people in their place. And what is that place, but the crime-ridden Rome that Sulla bequeaths to us? My Rome, Cicero. A Rome that breeds in shadow, that moves at night, that breathes the very air of vice without the disguises of politics or wealth. After all, that's why you've called me here, isn't it? To take you into that world, or to enter it myself and bring back to you whatever it is you're seeking. That's what I can offer you, if you're seeking the truth.'

# ¿ Jan 26, 2018 23:17

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

Epic High Five posted:

hey I'm startin a book club through a Discord, a more normal sort of setup, who's in?

thinkin 250-400 page book with a 4 week timeline, everything else is flexible based on how many sign up

What sort of books?

# ¿ Mar 10, 2018 20:11

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

StashAugustine posted:

catching up on a bunch of scifi over summer break. read altered carbon which was kinda cool and very eat the rich.

if you want 'eat the rich' progress through the trilogy onto the third book, "woken furies" which imo is my favorite, though it's much more character-centric than the other two books

# ¿ May 24, 2018 04:35

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

StashAugustine posted:

also as a catholic it kinda bugged me that i dont see the problem spinning up murder victims in a synth, but i get that's not the point

was raised lutheran and currently very atheist but surely a soul going to join god being forcibly brought back to speak for the dead would be viewed as ripping it away from its destiny, no? and even if you don't view it as such and believe that you can't forcibly hold the soul onto a material form, holding a facsimile of the soul and claiming that it can speak for the person's bodily form and experience would be itself kinda idolatric/blasphemous right?

# ¿ May 24, 2018 04:48

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

Finished with a long tear of historical fiction for now, diving back into nonfiction with Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed

# ¿ Jun 6, 2018 15:17

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

skaboomizzy posted:

Cable news will pull all the juicy excerpts for our hilarity, save your money.

And even if they don't, @katereadsbks will

# ¿ Aug 11, 2018 16:40

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

I've been reading "The Storm Before The Storm" by Mike Duncan and while I'm enjoying the content the actual writing itself is bugging me because it's essentially a transcript of how Duncan talks during his podcasts and it doesn't look like he had an editor go through it because I keep catching missing words or stuff that a good editor would never have let pass muster like overuse of "literally"

# ¿ Jan 6, 2019 02:20

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

I'm rereading James Howard Kunstler's* World Made by Hand, which I first read in I think 2010-2011, and back then reading that was an interesting thought experiment on what post-collapse living would look like, but nowadays it's just horribly depressing knowing that there's a decent chance I'll actually get to find out what living like that is and I'm having trouble getting through the book.

One thing that stands out to me nowadays that didn't back then is how thoroughly white the cast is. It's set somewhere rural in the Northeast coast only a few years after the collapse but there's not a single person with a dark skin shade to be seen.

* I know Kunstler has plunged deep into crank blogging but I'm in a doomsday mood and he's perfect for that.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2019 01:11

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

Helsing posted:

This book looks interesting but reading up on the author he seems very big on peak oil theories that were really hot in the mid 2000s but which seem to have been largely discredited now.

Sad to think that nowadays the whole peak whole scenario and the return to localism seems optimistic compared to a scenario where all the fish and insects die and instead of having to eat food grown within a days journey of our homes we all starve to death and the remnants of humanity scrape out a vestigial existence farming cockroaches on the shores of the North American great lakes.

Lol it's really something isn't it? This book has brought back a lot of memories of how pessimistic I was about the general global future a decade ago, and how it's only gotten way worse since then, bit by bit.

And yeah Kunstler was a huge, huge critic of American car culture and especially our godawful suburban sprawl and poor urban planning, which is how I originally got into him. I still think "The Geography of Nowhere" is worth reading (while keeping in mind it was written in 1993, right in the middle of the 90s boom). Most of what he has to say nowadays is just crank jeremiads, and peak oil ended up not being a big deal with all the advancements humanity has made in extraction and alternative energy.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2019 22:34

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

Idia posted:

I would just stick with Octavia E. Butler for that type of genre.

Verso is having a sale on their anti-fash books.

The Parable series looks interesting; any other books of hers that you'd in particular recommend?

# ¿ Jan 31, 2019 22:37

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

Two excerpts from the first half of World Made by Hand that I liked:

quote:

I generally ate a big breakfast. The amount of walking I did required it. In the old days, as a corporate executive, I kept going on little more than continuous cups of black coffee until dinnertime. I had one of those steel thermal mugs you carried everywhere with you as a kind of signifier of how busy, and therefore how important, you were. The people in my office joked that my thermal mug was surgically attached to my arm. In those days, in a life that now seemed as if it had taken place on another planet, we lived in Brookline, Massachusetts, and I worked for a software company called Ellipses on Route 128. Our division made network security programs: antivirus, antispam, antihacker, firewalls. I was head of marketing and spent the bulk of my time organizing promotional events at national trade shows in places like Atlanta and Las Vegas. We�d pay big-time rock and roll bands to get the customers in for the CEO�s sales pitch. We�d buy out whole vintages of California wineries to impress our clients. We�d hire celebrity chefs to feed them. My job paid well and we enjoyed the status of a nice house, German cars, and private schools for the children. I multitasked so hard I had panic attacks. I suppose all the coffee I drank didn�t help. Then, within a short span of time, our world changed completely.

We came here, to Union Grove, Sandy�s hometown, after the bomb went off in Los Angeles. That act of jihad was extraordinarily successful. It tanked the whole U.S. economy. The authorities finally had to start inspecting every shipping container that entered every harbor in the nation. Freighters anchored for weeks off Seattle, Norfolk, Baltimore, the Jersey terminals, Boston, and every other port of entry. Many of them eventually turned around and went home with their cargoes undelivered. The earth stopped being flat and became very round again. Even nations that were still talking to us after the war in the Holy Land, stopped being able to trade with us. Ellipses went down by stages, one division at a time. Ours was the last to go.

I was thirty-six then. We sold the house in Brookline at a substantial loss just to get out. We dumped the big BMW and kept the sedan. You could still get gasoline, though it was expensive and scarcities were worsening. We wanted to be as far away from the action as we could get without leaving the northeastern region of the country. Sandy�s father, Bill Trammel, was alive then, a retired vice president of the nearby Glens Falls National Bank. He was glad to have us all in the house in Union Grove because Sandy�s mother had died of cancer the year before, and it was a bad time to be old and lonely. Pneumonia took Bill two years after we arrived. Common antibiotics were in short supply. In a way, I was glad he went before Sandy and Genna and everything else that happened, because it would have broken his heart. He was absolutely a man of the twentieth century. His last coherent words, in the delirium of illness, were �Don�t worry, I�ll bring the car around . . .�

By the time he passed away, it was obvious there would be no return to �normality.� The economy wouldn�t be coming back. Globalism was over. The politicians and generals were failing to pull things together at the center. We would not be returning to Boston. The computer industry, in which so many hopes had been vested, was fading into history. I was fortunate to have carpentry skills to fall back on and to have a decent collection of hand tools.

The evangelist on the radio cut out, and I realized that the electricity had gone off. I felt relieved, even though I had only myself to blame for leaving the radio on. Listening to these maniacs had gotten to be a compulsion for me. I was desperate to learn anything about the world outside Washington County, because I worried constantly about my Daniel and where he might be, and whether it was dangerous there.

We didn�t have coffee anymore, or any caffeinated substitutes for it. I made a pot of rose-hip tea, which was our chief source of vitamin C, and fried up three slices of Jane Ann�s brown bread with plenty of butter in a cast-iron skillet that I had owned my entire adult life�I actually remembered buying it in a Target store in Hadley, Massachusetts, the year after I graduated from Amherst College. When the bread slices were crispy and fragrant, I took them out and dropped in three small pullet eggs. I missed black pepper terribly. We hadn�t seen any for years. Cinnamon too. Anything from the Far East was no longer available. But over the years I had developed some skill in brewing my own hot pepper sauce. It was worth something in trade. I put plenty on my eggs.

Once the radio went off you could hear roosters battling for supremacy of the village. Some people were annoyed by them, but I found them pleasantly reassuring. Their crowing and the vapors of the hot sauce helped clear enough room in my head to think about what I had to do. Planning my day was a way of not giving in to despair. It really is not possible to pay attention fully to two things at once�for instance, carpentry and suicide.

quote:

Halfway out to the general supply I ran into Shawn Watling, a big, shambling young man who so typified our times. He�d been born in a hospital and raised on computers, and then all of a sudden the world fell out from under him. I met him coming onto North Road where Black Creek Road joins up with it. There is a bridge there over the creek, which is a tributary of the Battenkill. Shawn worked as one of several hands on the Schmidt farm up the hill, which was in fruit, oats, buckwheat, and hay, with some beef cattle, and goats for milk and meat. Agriculture had changed completely without oil. We�d gone from a few people using machines to grow monoculture crops and process them for everybody else, to a society in which at least half the people used tools skillfully with human and animal muscle to feed the other half. With the population down so much, labor was at a premium. Shawn was probably paid decently, but his opportunities were limited.

His father, Denny Watling, had run a real estate office in town. His mother, Margie, was the leading sales agent. Shawn�s parents played in a country music band all tricked out in matching cowboy outfits at local bars and the county fair every August. They were regular small-town folk who read spy novels, got new cars every three years, and once took a vacation to see Paris. They were gone now, along with Shawn�s little brother, Cody, who had been my boy�s age, taken by the flu. Shawn inherited his father�s instruments (violin, mandolin, guitar) and was part of our music circle in church. He was a hell of a musician. He was in the last graduating class that Union Grove high school ever produced and he spent one semester at Colgate University before it, and most colleges everywhere as far as I knew, had to close on a temporary basis that now seemed permanent. Shawn went to work for Bill Schmidt because that was what there was to do for a young person like him. He was strong in a way that you hardly ever saw in the old days, strong from real work, not from lifting barbells or aerobics classes. At age twenty-three, he married another young survivor, Britney Blieveldt, and they had a girl named Sarah. Shawn was not a kid anymore. He and his family lived in town in his parents� old house, which was one of the nicest ones on Salem Street, our nicest street. Having a nice house didn�t make him wealthy or boost his status, though. There were plenty of empty houses in town and no one to sell them to. The real estate industry no longer existed.

When I met up with him on the way to the general supply, Shawn was leading a big furry black dog pulling a two-wheeled cart. The dog was part Newfoundland with some mastiff in him, Shawn said. It belonged to Mr. Schmidt. Few dogs were around anymore. Some had been eaten during the hunger that followed the flu in the spring of that year. People didn�t talk about it, it was so demoralizing. And now, with no manufactured pet food, you had to have a productive household to be able to feed one, which Mr. Schmidt certainly did.

�We need you on Tuesday night for Christmas practice,� I told him because he�d skip it if you didn�t pester him about it. Rehearsal for the Christmas carol service went on year-round and was more like an excuse for the circle to play regularly. At this time of year we usually played everything but Christmas music just because we liked to play. Sometimes we played string band dance music, sometimes old rock and roll, sometimes Handel. With the electricity off, you didn�t hear recorded music anymore. You had to make it yourself.

�You come by the house and collect me, I�ll go, Robert,� he said.

�I wish I didn�t have to drag you there.�

�I get awful tired, especially this time of year.�

�We�re supposed to play a levee at the Shushan grange July Fourth, you know.�

�We�ll just play the same old crap. �Possum Up a Gum Stump,� and all. We don�t need to practice that.�

�We do if we want to sound crisp.�

�I don�t care how it sounds.�

�That�s not a very positive attitude.�

He laughed bitterly. �We�ll be haying up at Schmidt�s all next week. He�ll probably have us out there until pitch dark, anyway.�

I know deep down Shawn loved to play. We just continued on for a while, enjoying the quiet road and the creak of the little cart�s axle. But the big black dog was panting from the heat, and a big gobbet of foamy spit hung from his jaw. Shawn limped slightly.

�Did you hurt yourself?� I said.

�I fell off Mr. Schmidt�s barn roof.�

�What were you doing up there?�

�Fixing it. What do you think?�

We walked a ways again in silence. I hadn�t known him to be so irritable before.

�It�s been mighty hot lately,� I said.

�It�s not just the heat. Jesus, Robert, look how we live? I�m practically a serf. You know what a serf is?�

�Of course I do. I went to college,� I said, and regretted it right away.

�Lucky you,� he said.

�Music always cheers me up,� I said.

�I�m glad it works for you.�

�Music salves the soul.�

�Nothing can salve my soul.�

�You know, Shawn, even back in normal times people got down and depressed. In fact, you could argue that people are generally better off now mentally than we were back then. We follow the natural cycles. We eat real food instead of processed crap full of chemicals. We�re not jacked up on coffee and television and sexy advertising all the time. No more anxiety about credit card bills��

�I don�t want to debate.�

�I bet it�s true, though.�

�Find somebody else if you want to have a debate.�

�It�s just conversation.�

�Whatever you call it, quit trying to persuade me that everything�s great, okay?� he said and stopped in his tracks. I stopped too. His face was red and tendons stood out on his neck. He was a large young man, and he looked a little scary.

�You frustrate the hell out of me, son,� I said.

�Do I? I work like a dog. Harder than this dog. From sunup to sundown, like a medieval peasant. I do it with hardly any sense of a future, and the last thing I need is a lecture from the generation that screwed up the world. Come on, Merlin,� he said to the dog.

He marched off stiffly. I watched him leading the dog for a few moments and then hurried to catch up with them.

I don't know how many people in America are truly prepared for a globalism collapse, in the slim chance that it does happen. I know I'm not. It's hard to really envision how thoroughly it'll change everyday life.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2019 21:35

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

hackbunny posted:

After The 2020 Commission Report I don't know if I can read another of these novelized essays. It's like porn, or sci-fi, in that they have a point or gimmick to them, pretty narrowly defined, wrapped in a kind-of-forced story that isn't written very well

I'm working my way through the sequels now and the first book turns out to have been, yeah, a novelized essay about The Collapse, while the sequels take the characters established in the first book and do stuff with them

I think the first book was probably the best of the bunch though so I probably won't be recommending it to others unless they're also a fan of Kunstler // doomsday fiction // crushing car culture

the second book has an unintentionally hilarious moment where the landlord character's home gets invaded by bandits and literally draws hanzo steel to kill them. this is because the landlord character spent several years in japan before the collapse. james howard kunstler is 70 years old.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2019 04:48

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

I started reading A Wizard Of Earthsea finally, after detouring into doomsday fiction with the four World Made in Hand books, and Wizard of Earthsea is surprisingly good so far. I was a bit cautious when I saw that it was written in the 60s, fantasy from that era tends to be more along the lines of Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber or McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern stuff, but this is like -- actually competently written?

# ¿ Feb 28, 2019 22:41

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

Finished a few more chapters of A Wizard of Earthsea and one thing here I want to specifically praise is Le Guin actually effectively using chapters to break up her story in segments. Many, many novelists treat chapters as an afterthought, or just assign a chapter to each and every single scene. For instance, the second chapter of AWoE, "Shadow", tells a story in itself about a part of Ged's life, I can pick it up, start reading it, finish reading it, and put down the book! It sounds really simple and basic but it really improves the experience of reading the novel and she does it better than most of the recent authors I've been reading.

Le Guin also doesn't end each and every single chapter dangling with a suspenseful plot hook designed to psychologically encourage you to keep turning the page -- she trusts in the story's own merits to keep the reader interested and engaged.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2019 19:15

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

Finished Wizard of Earthsea. The second half wasn't as good as the first half, dealing with the constant slog of gibberish names as Ged passes through dozens of places was a little bit too much. The ending was also telegraphed a couple chapters early. Overall a pretty decent book. The School of Roke chapter really contrasts how drawn-out and silly books like Harry Potter and the Name of the Wind are.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2019 20:02

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

I started reading the second Earthsea book, the Tombs of Atuan, and I'm a couple chapters in and it seems to be about a demon priestess who spends her time in a pitch black dungeon? Confused by this wild tonal shift after the first book.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2019 18:20

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

TheDon01 posted:

Picked this book up after reading these excerpts. Stoked to dig into this book

I've been meaning to write up a recap of the books now that I'd finished them but here's an impetus as good as any I guess.

The series is a quartet, telling the story of a rural town in a post-collapse America over a year, one book for each season. The author was a big Peak Oil theorist (and suburbia/car culture critic, which is how I got into him) back in the day and wrote these books as mostly an exploration of what he thought the future would look like if globalism collapsed.

The series is about a town in northern New York trying to put itself back together after a decade plus of malaise as people failed to adjust well to the collapse. It explores (somewhat clumsily) how different communities would organize itself given the lack of an existing national government and minimal communication between villages. In the first book the protagonist visits in turn a strongman-controlled port city, a quasi-feudal farming colony, and an anarchist commune.

The writing is usually passable, but gets very clumsy when Kunstler wants to make a political point (the anarchist junktown in the first book, the race war in the South in the third book, the fake socialists and particularly the SJW caricature in the fourth book) or when he tries to do a cool scene (the totally-not-a-feudal-lord drawing his literal Hanzo steel to kill some invading bandits), and the ending in the fourth book is embarrassingly saccharine especially after the trauma he puts his characters through.

I wouldn't say they're good books, but they're enjoyable if you're into rough-living and collapse stuff like I am. There's a lot of stuff that Kunstler gets wrong (his theory that the progress from feminism would be rolled back is questionable), and his status as an old white male really shows in some of the scenes and characters he writes up, particularly with the female characters, but one thing he does get right is how thoroughly we rely on globalized industry for essentially everything we use in our everyday lives. If that ever gets messed with the adjustment period is going to be really rough. It also got me thinking about how people would personally react to a collapse -- how many people would just essentially give up and fade away?

# ¿ Mar 5, 2019 18:40

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

That reminds me, I don't know if it counts as post-apocalypse fiction, but Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy has multiple characters who are bonafide Communists and the trilogy is pretty much all about how to build a better society on Mars while fighting off poisonous capitalistic influence from Earth

Strongly recommend to any fan of hard sci-fi

RIP Arkady Bogdanov, a real mensch

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 04:23

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

Arkady was cspam as gently caress

Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson posted:

PART 2: THE VOYAGE OUT

...

The engineers, including Maya, spent many mornings in training simulations. These took place on the backup bridge in Torus B, which had the latest in image synthesizers; the simulations were so sophisticated that there was little visible difference between them and the act itself. This did not necessarily make them interesting: the standard orbital insertion approach, simulated weekly, was dubbed �The Mantra Run,� and became quite a bore to every conceivable flight crew.

But sometimes even boredom was preferable to the alternatives. Arkady was their training specialist, and he had a perverse talent for designing problem runs so hard that they often �killed� everybody. These runs were strangely unpleasant experiences, and did not make Arkady popular among his victims. He mixed problem runs with Mantra Runs randomly, but more and more often they were problem runs; they would �approach Mars� and red lights would flash, sometimes with sirens, and they were in trouble again. Once they struck a planetesimal weighing approximately fifteen grams, leaving a large flaw in the heat shield. Sax Russell had calculated that their chances of hitting anything larger than a gram were about one in every seven thousand years of travel, but nevertheless there they were, emergency!, adrenaline pouring through them even as they pooh-poohed the very idea of it, rushing up to the hub and into EVA suits, going out to fill the pothole before they hit the Martian atmosphere and burned to a crisp; and halfway there, Arkady�s voice came over their intercoms: �Not fast enough! All of us are dead.�

But that was a simple one. Others. . . .The ship, for instance, was guided by a fly-by-wire system, meaning that the pilots fed instructions to flight computers which translated them into the actual thrusts needed to achieve the desired result. This was how it had to be, because when approaching a gravitational mass like Mars at their speed, one simply could not feel or intuit what burns would achieve the desired effects. So none of them were flyers in the sense of a pilot flying a plane. Nevertheless, Arkady frequently blew the entire massively redundant system just as they were reaching a critical moment (which failure, Russell said, had about a one-in-ten-billion chance of happening) and they had to take over and command all the rockets mechanically, watching the monitors and an orange-on-black visual image of Mars bearing down on them, and they could either go long and skip off into deep space and die a lingering death, or go short and crash into the planet and die instantly, and if the latter, they got to watch it right down to the simulated 120 kilometer per second final smash.

Or it might be a mechanical failure: main rockets, stabilizing rockets, computer hardware or software, heatshield deployment; all of them had to work perfectly during the approach. And failures of these systems were the most likely of all� in the range, Sax said (though others contested his risk-assessment methods), of one in every ten thousand approaches. So they would do it again and red lights would flash, and they would groan, and beg for a Mantra Run even as they partly welcomed the new challenge. When they managed to survive a mechanical failure, they were tremendously pleased; it could be the high point of a week. Once John Boone successfully aerobraked by hand, with a single main rocket functioning, hitting the safe millisecond of arc at the only possible speed. No one could believe it. �Blind luck,� Boone said, grinning widely as the deed was talked about at dinner.

Most of Arkady�s problem runs ended in failure, however, meaning death for all. Simulated or not, it was hard not to be sobered by these experiences, and after that, irritated with Arkady for inventing them. One time they repaired every monitor in the bridge just in time to see the screens register a hit by a small asteroid, which sheared through the hub and killed them all. Another time Arkady, as part of the navigation team, made an �error� and instructed the computers to increase the ship�s spin rather than decrease it. �Pinned to the floor by six gs!� he cried in mock horror, and they had to crawl on the floor for half an hour, pretending to rectify the error while weighing half a ton each. When they succeeded, Arkady leaped off the floor and began pushing them away from the control monitor. �What the hell are you doing?� Maya yelled.

�He�s gone crazy,� Janet said.

�He�s simulated going crazy,� Nadia corrected her. �We have to figure out�� doing an end run around Arkady �� how to deal with someone on the bridge going insane!�

Which no doubt was true. But they could see the whites of Arkady�s eyes all the way around, and there wasn�t a trace of recognition in him as he silently assaulted them. It took all five of them to restrain him, and Janet and Phyllis Boyle were hurt by his sharp elbows.

�Well?� he said at dinner afterward, grinning lopsidedly, as he was growing a fat lip. �What if it happens? We�re under pressure up here, and the approach will be worst of all. What if someone cracks?� He turned to Russell and the grin grew wider. �What are the chances of that, eh?� And he began to sing a Jamaican song, in a Slavic Caribbean accent: �Pressure drop, oh pressure drop, oh-o, pressure going to drop on you-oo-oo!�

So they kept trying, handling the problem runs as seriously as they could, even the attack by Martian natives or the decoupling of Torus H caused by �explosive bolts installed by mistake when the ship was built,� or the last-minute veering of Phobos out of its orbit. Dealing with the more implausible scenarios sometimes took on a kind of surreal black humor, and Arkady replayed some of his videotapes as after-dinner entertainment, which sometimes got people launched into the air with laughter.

But the plausible problem runs . . . They kept on coming, morning after morning. And despite the solutions, despite the protocols for finding solutions, there was that sight, time after time� the red planet rushing at them at an unimaginable 40,000 kilometers an hour, until it filled the screen and the screen went white, and small black letters appeared on it: Collision.

...

Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson posted:

...

People began to talk about other things, discussing the various business of the day that had been so rudely interrupted, or taking the opportunity to talk about other things. After a half hour or more, one of those conversations got louder. Maya didn�t hear how it began, but suddenly Arkady said, very loudly and in English, �I don�t think we should pay any attention to plans made for us back on Earth!�

Other conversations went silent, and people turned to look at him. He had popped up and was floating under the rotating roof of the chamber, where he could survey them all and speak like some mad flying spirit.

�I think we should make new plans,� he said. �I think we should be making them now. Everything should be redesigned from the beginning, with our own thinking expressed. It should extend everywhere, even to the first shelters we build.�

�Why bother?� Maya asked, annoyed at his grandstanding. �They�re good designs.� It really was irritating; Arkady often took center stage, and people always looked at her as if she were somehow responsible for him, as if it were her job to keep him from pestering them.

�Buildings are the template of a society,� Arkady said.

�They�re rooms,� Sax Russell pointed out.

�But rooms imply the social organization inside them.� Arkady looked around, pulling people into the discussion with his gaze. �The arrangement of a building shows what the designer thinks should go on inside. We saw that at the beginning of the voyage, when Russians and Americans were segregated into Torus D and B. We were supposed to remain two entities, you see. It will be the same on Mars. Buildings express values, they have a sort of grammar, and rooms are the sentences. I don�t want people in Washington or Moscow saying how I should live my life, I�ve had enough of that.�

�What don�t you like about the design of the first shelters?� John asked, looking interested.

�They are rectangular,� Arkady said. This got a laugh, but he persevered: �Rectangular, the conventional shape! With work space separated from living quarters, as if work were not part of life. And the living quarters are taken up mostly by private rooms, with hierarchies expressed, in that leaders are assigned larger spaces.�

�Isn�t that just to facilitate their work?� Sax said.

�No. It isn�t really necessary. It�s a matter of prestige. A very conventional example of American business thinking, if I may say so.�

There was a groan, and Phyllis said, �Do we have to get political, Arkady?�

At the very mention of the word, the cloud of listeners ruptured. Mary Dunkel and a couple of others pushed out and headed for the other end of the room.

�Everything is political,� Arkady said at their backs. �Nothing more so than this voyage of ours. We are beginning a new society, how could it help but be political?�

�We�re a scientific station,� Sax said. �It doesn�t necessarily have much politics to it.�

�It certainly didn�t last time I was there,� John said, looking thoughtfully at Arkady.

�It did,� Arkady said, �but it was simpler. You were an all-American crew, there on a temporary mission, doing what your superiors told you to do. But now we are an international crew, establishing a permanent colony. It�s completely different.�

Slowly people were drifting through the air toward the conversation, to hear better what was being said. Rya Jimenez said, �I�m not interested in politics,� and Mary Dunkel agreed from the other end of the room: �That�s one of the things I�m here to get away from!�

Several Russians replied at once. �That itself is a political position!� and the like. Alex exclaimed, �You Americans would like to end politics and history, so you can stay in a world you dominate!�

A couple of Americans tried to protest, but Alex overrode them. �It�s true! The whole world has changed in the last thirty years, every country looking at its function, making enormous changes to solve problems� all but the United States. You have become the most reactionary country in the world.�

Sax said, �The countries that changed had to because they were rigid before, and almost broke. The United States already had flex in its system, and so it didn�t have to change as drastically. I say the American way is superior because it�s smoother. It�s better engineering.�

This analogy gave Alex pause, and while he was thinking about it John Boone, who had been watching Arkady with great interest, said, �Getting back to the shelters. How would you make them different?�

Arkady said, �I�m not quite sure� we need to see the sites we build on, walk around in them, talk it over. It�s a process I advocate, you see. But in general I think work space and living space should be mixed as much as is practical. Our work will be more than making wages� it will be our art, our whole life. We will give it to each other, we will not buy it. Also there should be no signs of hierarchy. I don�t even believe in the leader system we have now.� He nodded politely at Maya. �We are all equally responsible now, and our buildings should show it. A circle is best� difficult in construction terms, but it makes sense for heat conservation. A geodesic dome would be a good compromise� easy to construct, and indicating our equality. As for the inside, perhaps mostly open. Everyone should have their room, sure, but these should be small. Set in the rim, perhaps, and facing larger communal spaces�� He picked up a mouse at one terminal, began to sketch on the screen. �There. This is architectural grammar that would say �All equal.� Yes?�

�There�s lots of prefab units already there,� John said. �I�m not sure they could be adapted.�

�They could if we wanted to do it.�

�But is it really necessary? I mean, it�s clear we�re already a team of equals.�

�Is it clear?� Arkady said sharply, looking around. �If Frank and Maya tell us to do something, are we free to ignore them? If Houston or Baikonur tell us to do something, are we free to ignore them?�

�I think so,� John replied mildly.

This statement got him a sharp look from Frank. The conversation was breaking up into several arguments, as a lot of people had things to say, but Arkady cut through them all again:

�We have been sent here by our governments, and all of our governments are flawed, most of them disastrously. It�s why history is such a bloody mess. Now we are on our own, and I for one have no intention of repeating all of Earth�s mistakes just because of conventional thinking. We are the first Martian colonists! We are scientists! It is our job to think things new, to make them new!�

The arguments broke out again, louder than ever. Maya turned away and cursed Arkady under her breath, dismayed at how angry people were getting. She saw that John Boone was grinning. He pushed off the floor toward Arkady, came to a stop by piling into him, and then shook Arkady�s hand, which swung them both around in the air, in an awkward kind of dance. This gesture of support immediately set people to thinking again, Maya could see it on their surprised faces; along with John�s fame he had a reputation for being moderate and low-keyed, and if he approved of Arkady�s ideas, then it was a different matter.

�Goddammit, Ark,� John said. �First those crazy problem runs, and now this� you�re a wild man, you really are! How in the hell did you get them to let you on board this ship, anyway?�

Exactly my question, thought Maya.

�I lied,� Arkady said.

Everyone laughed. Even Frank, looking surprised. �But of course I lied!� Arkady shouted, a big upside-down grin splitting his red beard. �How else could I get here? I want to go to Mars to do what I want, and the selection committee wanted people to go and do what they were told. You know that!� He pointed down at them and shouted, �You all lied, you know you did!�

...

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 04:34

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

SKULL.GIF posted:

I started reading the second Earthsea book, the Tombs of Atuan, and I'm a couple chapters in and it seems to be about a demon priestess who spends her time in a pitch black dungeon? Confused by this wild tonal shift after the first book.

Got a few chapters further and now this makes a lot more sense. Got to applaud Le Guin for that cold open, it set up the middle of the book really well, just took some faith in the reader to keep going.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 19:41

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

Tombs of Atuan had a great ending, would recommend, good book

Partway into the final book in the trilogy now, The Farthest Shore, and I'm pretty sure I know what's being set up here by Le Guin but am expecting to be surprised

# ¿ Mar 14, 2019 17:41

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 15:37

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

I finished The Farthest Shore today, completing the first Earthsea trilogy. I won't spoil much about it beyond it's a great twist on the Merlin-and-Arthur story, but I do want to quote this part of the foreword by Le Guin which I enjoyed and appreciated:

Ursula K. Le Guin posted:

IT WOULD BE LOVELY IF writing a story was like getting into a little boat that drifted off and took me to the promised land, or climbing on a dragon�s back and flying off to Selidor. But it�s only as a reader that I can do that. As a writer, to take full responsibility without claiming total control requires a lot of work, a lot of groping and testing, flexibility, caution, watchfulness. I have no chart to follow, so I have to be constantly alert. The boat needs steering. There have to be long conversations with the dragon I ride. But however watchful and aware I am, I know I can never be fully aware of the currents that carry the boat, of where the winds beneath the dragon�s wings are blowing.

A writer lives and works in the world she was born into, and no matter how firm her own purpose, or how seemingly far from the present day her subject, she and her work are subject to the changing winds and currents of that world.

I was a child during the Great Depression, and eleven years old when America entered the Second World War. I wrote this book soon after the Sixties�a time of high tides and high winds, of great hope and wild folly, when for a while it seemed a more generous vision might replace the sour dream of profiteering and consumerism that has been the bane of my country.

As I look back at the book now, I see how it reflects that time. Along with the active movement to free America from racist injustice and from militarism, there was a real vision of getting free from compulsive materialism, the confusion of goods with good. Yet already we were watching much of that vision blur off into wishful thinking or become drug-dependent.

Being an irreligious puritan and a rational mystic, I think it�s irresponsible to let a belief think for you or a chemical dream for you.

So the book�s dark themes of loss and betrayal took shape. So Ged and Arren had to come to Hort Town, and drug addiction and slavery are seen for the first time in the Archipelago. Evil, in this book, has an immediate, ugly, human shape, because I saw evil not as some horde of foreign demons with bad teeth and superweapons but as an insidious and ever-present enemy in my own daily life in my own country: the ruinous irresponsibility of greed.

We are frequently told that greed for endless increase of material goods is natural and universal�as is greed for endless life. We are all supposed to agree that you can�t be too rich or live too long.

The desire to live is certainly natural and universal, since it�s the basic directive of living creatures: once born, our job and our desire is to try to stay alive.

But is that the same as a desire to stay alive forever, to be immortal? Or is it just that we can�t imagine not being, so we invent an endless existence called immortality?

Knowing that everything on earth has an end, we know the afterlife can�t be on earth, so it has to be somewhere else�a totally other place where the living can�t come and where nothing can ever change. To me, the imagery of the various afterlives and underworlds, the heavens and hells, appears marvelous and powerful, but I can�t believe in any of them except as I �believe� in any imaginative creation as a hint, an indication, a sign of something more than can be said or shown. The idea of individual immortality, an endless ego-existence, is more dreadful to me than the idea of letting go the self in death to rejoin shared, eternal being. I see life as a shared gift, received from others and passed on to others, and living and dying as one process, in which lies both our suffering and our reward. Without mortality to purchase it, how can we have the consciousness of eternity? I think the price is worth paying.

# ¿ Mar 22, 2019 04:01

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > cspam book club II -- edification via obsolete mediums

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