Utah Clean Air Rally
Late January 2013. High on the east benches of the Salt Lake Valley, following an invigorating jaunt at Alta, Ironic War Criminal and I regard the squirming and skittering of the masses in the valley below through the frosted windows of his palatial vacation rental. Deep into our second box of child-rolled rare Cubans, minds practically marinating in Courvoisier, IWC asks me a question. "Kyle, old bean, tell me, why is the valley so filled with smog?" I set down my snooker cue and drain my glass and then gesture to the mountains in the distance. "Well, normally, the air nearer the surface of the Earth is warmer than the air above it, because the Earth's radiation is the primary source of heat for the atmosphere. During an inversion, which in Utah happens typically during the winter, the Sun provides less energy (being lower in the sky), the Earth's radiative heating capacity is less, and as a result, the lower levels of air are cooler than normal. If a warm front moves in during such a situation, the cooler air can become trapped below the warmer air, and the normal process of convection by which warm air rises and becomes cool, is closed. The cramped geography of northern Utah valleys like the one Salt Lake City is in makes it even harder for the air to escape. In such conditions, all the pollution we generate is no longer shared with everyone else and dissipated around the world, mother nature perversely forces us to Breathe Local in a shocking and properly dialectical movement we as Marxist-Leninists could learn a tremendous deal from."
Over the last several years and especially in the last few months, during the particularly bad winter we've had, which was drier than normal and thus led to longer and more severe spells of inversion, everyone has become an amateur meteorologist and pollution expert. In addition, for several years a number of 'forces' I will discuss below have been gradually asserting themselves in Utah politics. The combination of a rising environmental consciousness of a particular type and an immediate problem (gross air) led to a rally at the State Capitol in late January called "Clean Air, No Excuses."
By Utah standards the rally was fairly large, about four thousand people (there was no police estimate that I came across, which indicates that the police may not have been there at all), which is probably less than the annual "Take Back Utah" ATV rally but definitely dwarfs May Day and the Pride Parade. In true 'zzoner style I rode past the rally on my way to the liquor store. People who actually went compared it to a party, not in the exciting Debordian-Paris Commune sense, but a party in the sense of standing around. Nothing was disrupted, as the legislature was not in session that day, and no remnants of the protest (an occupation camp, property damage) were left to remind the legislators who recently concluded the year's session of their passing.
Who attended? The CityHome Collective, which seems to be some sort of noxious new age real estate agency, was on hand to snap brand-enhancing photos. Choice placard selections: "Electrify State Fleets" "Now I Know What Its Like To Live In China" "Herbert We Cannot Breathe Money." Supporting the rally were the Athletes for Clean Air, Utah Moms for Clean Air, Utah Physicians For A Health Environment, BREATHE Utah (possible yoga move?), Ralph Becker, Salt Lake Mayor, a couple state senators and representatives from the Avenues-Marmalade-Sugarhouse axis of progressive, upscale Salt Lake neighborhoods, Peaceful Uprising (Tim DeChristopher, who went to prison for disrupting a public -lands auction, is their most famous member), and the kind of people you see in the photo above you. Conspicuous by their absence were native groups (who are active in Salt Lake, there was an Idle No More protest here a while back) and unions. Of course if native groups had showed up they would have been asked to join in the singing of the following song, the lyrics to which were passed out beforehand:
Oh beautiful, for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain.
America, America,
God shed His grace on thee.
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
And here is Utah’s majesty
Bespoiled by wealth & greed.
By profiteers of industry
with money as their creed.
Oh Deseret, Oh Deseret,
when will your people rise?
And cleanse the air of filth, and dare
To stop believing lies!
Our pioneers came here to thrive
In nature’s harmony.
Its healthy water, land and air,
A real wealth legacy!
Our stewardship of Zion is
to safeguard it from ruin.
So we must all accept the call
To get good leaders soon
Just meditate on the wretchedness of that for a minute.
Wealth and greed, presumably not the wealth and greed of the pioneers who chased, starved and murdered natives all over the state out of an unquenchable thirst for land, and then built factories and mines everywhere they could stuff them? Which 'people' are supposed to 'rise' and reclaim their idealized 'Deseret' (the Mormon name for their never-realized kingdom), and who are they supposed to take it from, exactly?
So the song is horrendous and a clearer example of settler chauvinism couldn't have been chosen if they had made offending natives and immigrants an official goal. But the speeches weren't any better. Reacting to the governor recently issuing permits for the expansion of oil refineries in the valley, a Utah Mom of Utah Mom's For Clean Air was careful to reduce everything about the problem to folksy small business bullshit, mirroring precisely the legislature she was allegedly there to protest: "Just like you don’t write checks on a bank account that’s overdrawn, you don’t issue permits in a state where we’re out of compliance with federal air standards." If the bourgeois respectability and Civic Virtue had gotten any thicker at this place it would have shoved out the pollution.
One of the funnier tidbits I found in an article is that the CEO of a local bus company provided a couple buses to shuttle people to the capitol from a nearby light rail station, and was apparently allowed to give a speech in which he declaimed against cars and their negative effects and then claimed that "I've been trying to get people out of cars... and into buses, for forty years!" Horns.aiff.
The Utah Transit Authority, which runs one of the most expensive and least effective transit systems in the nation, is also piggybacking on the rally, complaining that the state has systematically starved it of funds and running an ad campaign presenting themselves as the solution to the valley's air problems. But the recent disastrous re-routing of the entire bus system, and the expansion of the light rail system into areas where people are wealthy enough that they don't need it, and continuing fare hikes, confirms that their priorities are on continuing to build a public transit system exclusively for people who don't need public transit. Recently they build a white-elephant 'streetcar' that is barely used, and only by tourists, and are planning another one, and in the meanwhile there are entire towns in the valley with no rail service whatsoever and spotty bus coverage. Low-income areas, e.g. the areas where transit is most needed, are also drastically under-served. Following the recent fare hike, which came at the same time as the opening of two new lines with a dozen or so new stops, the system saw an absolute decline in ridership. And they blame the governor and the legislature for that?
Predictably, we can say that the rally was a failure, that it consistently erased class, failed to grasp the meaning of the concept of metabolic rift and its consequences for capitalism in the 21st century, and was the political equivalent of a placebo. But it still was a rally, it was better than nothing, and it represents the emergence of, at least in the case of Peaceful Uprising and the Moms, of a force nominally opposed to the endemic corruption of Utah politics and in favor of some sort of nature, however idealized. The Salt Lake City council, which a few years ago was predominantly Republican, is now majority Democratic, and the recent crop of elected councilpersons were all forced to pay lip service to the idea of sustainability and greenness. That talk, even though it is almost entirely talk, indicates that it is possible to discuss things which were not on the agenda before, and the hypocrisy is a little more glaring than it was before. If the 'nature' this movement promotes remains idealized, and the movement refuses to abandon the particular style of capitalism it has decided is 'good,' it will quickly descend into mystical garbage. I guess a bunch of the local Food Not Bombs kids are reading Hamsun together. I respect them on aesthetic grounds.
It is still likely that the movement as it exists will get absolutely nowhere with the small-business fascists and cartoon characters in the legislature, including the representative who voted against a domestic violence bill because he was concerned that women might confuse "a little roughhousing" with rape, or the governor who rejected a fully-funded Medicare mandate for the explicit reason of rebuking the president. Given how little ground they're likely to gain, the movement may radicalize, or it may change composition entirely if the brewing discontent with public transit or corruption turns into something more organized. But until then it's likely to remain embarrassing and ineffective.
Edited by stegosaurus ()
The SLC pollution came as quite a shock to me, Utah does a good job at keeping it's dirty little secret under-wraps and golly it's a good looking place apart from that. Calgary and Denver are plains cities pretending to have exciting topography because there's a shimmer of mountains in tha background but Salt Lake City snuggles into a curve right up against the Wasatch range and they are truly impressive mountains. All that snow melting each spring and coursing across the plain to the lake, I can see why it was an attractive place for a settlement.....and on a related note here is a satellite map of California in 1851 before America ruined it
Would have been incredible with those big free flowing rivers in the central valley but unfortunately that big lake i think is in the way of Bakersfield and so it had to be destroyed so that we could have C(K)orn
PS Steg I assume that conversation was before I passed out. Cheers massively for telling us about the local specialties, i'm still rocking my 'GET SOME GUNS N AMMO, MURRAY UTAH! hoodie, it was an exhilarating lesson in the American tradition of irresponsibility and instant gratification
Edited by Ironicwarcriminal ()
ontario froze the minimum wage at $6.85 / hour in 1995 because a right-wing government won the election that year. when the liberals took power in 2003 they began to increase the wage. there was then a large push by labour unions for a $10 minimum wage. the government agreed to it as part of a limited (joke really) "anti-poverty agenda". the minimum wage was therefore raised over a few years to $10.25 in 2010. because of weak employment numbers the province decided to freeze it for a few years. dalton mcguinty retired and recently a new liberal premier (katheen wynne) took office on a sort of progressive-rhetoric agenda.
wynne kicked the issue to a panel. during this period, social movements coalesced around a $14 demand, especially the unions. wynne announced (before the panel reported) that $14 was off the table. eventually the panel just said things should be indexed to inflation, and the government announced an $11 wage.
so the NDP leader (andrea horwath) announced a few weeks ago that her party would support a $12 minimum wage. this shocked the unions and leftists. some NDP MPPs had been working with minimum wage campaigners and had said they supported a $14 wage, so it was a surprise that they would call for a wage barely more than the liberals. there was a provincial convention since then and there were loud calls to back a $14 minimum wage, and the party bureaucrats essentially intervened to stop the debate from proceeding to a concrete demand for $14. i've seen a district NDP president write that he was outraged that the party had done this.
moreover, horwath said she would twin the increase in the minimum wage (which would happen over two years) with significant cuts in small business taxes, which she said would compensate the businesses for the impact of the additional $1 in wages. leftists have been complaining that this is terrible politics because it suggests that social policies have to be directly bought by concessions to business. i've seen NDP hacks defending the party, saying that a $1 increase is better than nothing, which seems like a pretty sad comment. i mean, a minimum wage worker at only 20 hours a week average would lose $2000 gross a year compared to a $14 wage, and that's the NDP's central poverty plank.
the NDP's basic response is: we're the only game in town. there's no real left party in ontario like there is in quebec, and the union bureaucracy is fused to the NDP in many ways. starting a left party could isolate labour from their shot at goodies from an NDP government, and they don't want to be shut out. the core of the NDP vote in toronto would see 'splitting the left' as crazy and most have a lot of affection for the party of jack layton. people who currently don't vote (or can't, like a lot of immigrants) probably wouldn't care that much about a left-social-democratic party anyways, and it'd probably have a lot of difficulty winning a single seat.
there are tiny countercurrents that suggest alternative modes of politics (the small maoist faction, the anarchists, the worker's assembly), but most of these don't have much weight yet. but it'll be interesting to see how far the union movement stretches again over NDP betrayals.
Ironicwarcriminal posted:I read all of that and I agree. This current wave of light-rail in the US (especially sunbelt cities with entrenched car culture) makes a lot more sense when you realize that it's basically like a Baseball Stadium or a Whole Foods or an appearance on Letterman: a tribute to the egos of the mini megalomaniacs who actually get into local government.
The SLC pollution came as quite a shock to me, Utah does a good job at keeping it's dirty little secret under-wraps and golly it's a good looking place apart from that. Calgary and Denver are plains cities pretending to have exciting topography because there's a shimmer of mountains in tha background but Salt Lake City snuggles into a curve right up against the Wasatch range and they are truly impressive mountains. All that snow melting each spring and coursing across the plain to the lake, I can see why it was an attractive place for a settlement.....and on a related note here is a satellite map of California in 1851 before America ruined it
Would have been incredible with those big free flowing rivers in the central valley but unfortunately that big lake i think is in the way of Bakersfield and so it had to be destroyed so that we could have C(K)orn
PS Steg I assume that conversation was before I passed out. Cheers massively for telling us about the local specialties, i'm still rocking my 'GET SOME GUNS N AMMO, MURRAY UTAH! hoodie, it was an exhilarating lesson in the American tradition of irresponsibility and instant gratification
is that real? it's hard to believe that's real, considering that AFAIK satellites weren't invented until AT LEAST 100 years later. therefore, i can't believe that it's real.
p.s. nice Post, OP.
Ironicwarcriminal posted:I read all of that and I agree. This current wave of light-rail in the US (especially sunbelt cities with entrenched car culture) makes a lot more sense when you realize that it's basically like a Baseball Stadium or a Whole Foods or an appearance on Letterman: a tribute to the egos of the mini megalomaniacs who actually get into local government.
The SLC pollution came as quite a shock to me, Utah does a good job at keeping it's dirty little secret under-wraps and golly it's a good looking place apart from that. Calgary and Denver are plains cities pretending to have exciting topography because there's a shimmer of mountains in tha background but Salt Lake City snuggles into a curve right up against the Wasatch range and they are truly impressive mountains. All that snow melting each spring and coursing across the plain to the lake, I can see why it was an attractive place for a settlement.....and on a related note here is a satellite map of California in 1851 before America ruined it
Would have been incredible with those big free flowing rivers in the central valley but unfortunately that big lake i think is in the way of Bakersfield and so it had to be destroyed so that we could have C(K)orn
PS Steg I assume that conversation was before I passed out. Cheers massively for telling us about the local specialties, i'm still rocking my 'GET SOME GUNS N AMMO, MURRAY UTAH! hoodie, it was an exhilarating lesson in the American tradition of irresponsibility and instant gratification
i totally agree that there is something basically unreal about politics at the local level, its like nobody takes it all seriously. it seems like most people that run for office here do it because they are bored. and they have a completely detached view of cities and what makes them work. for instance, I'm sure nobody who is involved in planning the city's bike lane initiative has ever ridden to work regularly. and everyone on the council and in the legislature is obsessed with attracting 'conferences' to town, its gross.
i'd like to hear more of your perspective on the environmental movement there and the weird rich-people-only public transit
stegosaurus posted:changed the thread title so that this can be the general purpose rhizzone 'tell us whats up' thread
recent bushwick news is they decided the old thorium refinery at the south end of bushwick is a radioactive hazard and people should avoid walking by it more often than they need to.
that is a map of our neighborhood. the green areas are places where lots and lots of white people from ohio, oregon, australia, florida are coming to feed developers. lots of yuppies getting ready to spawn. the red area in the north part there, is part of the heavily industrial area around newtown creek, the most polluted superfund site in the country. the red circle down at the bottom is the thorium refinery. idk its pretty crazy to see rich people living amidst piles of horrible trash the whole time.
germanjoey posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:I read all of that and I agree. This current wave of light-rail in the US (especially sunbelt cities with entrenched car culture) makes a lot more sense when you realize that it's basically like a Baseball Stadium or a Whole Foods or an appearance on Letterman: a tribute to the egos of the mini megalomaniacs who actually get into local government.
The SLC pollution came as quite a shock to me, Utah does a good job at keeping it's dirty little secret under-wraps and golly it's a good looking place apart from that. Calgary and Denver are plains cities pretending to have exciting topography because there's a shimmer of mountains in tha background but Salt Lake City snuggles into a curve right up against the Wasatch range and they are truly impressive mountains. All that snow melting each spring and coursing across the plain to the lake, I can see why it was an attractive place for a settlement.....and on a related note here is a satellite map of California in 1851 before America ruined it
Would have been incredible with those big free flowing rivers in the central valley but unfortunately that big lake i think is in the way of Bakersfield and so it had to be destroyed so that we could have C(K)orn
PS Steg I assume that conversation was before I passed out. Cheers massively for telling us about the local specialties, i'm still rocking my 'GET SOME GUNS N AMMO, MURRAY UTAH! hoodie, it was an exhilarating lesson in the American tradition of irresponsibility and instant gratificationis that real? it's hard to believe that's real, considering that AFAIK satellites weren't invented until AT LEAST 100 years later. therefore, i can't believe that it's real.
p.s. nice Post, OP.
it's an estimate that a geographer named mark clark did. not real, but ostensibly based on a bit of research. the whole giant lake in the middle of socal was actually a thing, though
Predating the launch of Sputnik by over a century (2), President Taylor’s task force, consisting of civil engineers and frontiersmen, constructs a rocket in the Californian wilderness, equips its payload with the most powerful camera known to humankind at the time - endowed with revolutionary colour-capturing capacity - and launches it skyward from the slopes of Mount Whitney (3).
Edited by ilmdge ()
Predating the rise of the Third Reich by over a century (2), Abraham Lincoln's task force, consisting of prospectors and frontiersmen, constructs a concentration camp in the wilderness of Silicon Valley, equips its mass graves and ovens with the most powerful art form known to humankind at the time- Anime, endowed with counter-revolutionary soul-sapping moe - and launches it directly into my gaping ass from the slopes who created it
Edited by palafox ()
ilmdge posted:It's real.
Predating the launch of Sputnik by over a century (2), President Taylor’s task force, consisting of civil engineers and frontiersmen, constructs a rocket in the Californian wilderness, equips its payload with the most powerful camera known to humankind at the time - endowed with revolutionary colour-capturing capacity - and launches it skyward from the slopes of Mount Whitney (3).
theyre apparently in nyc, does anyone have any contact with them at all
stegosaurus posted:i guess the npc(oc) split already lol
theyre apparently in nyc, does anyone have any contact with them at all
what did they split over? i only saw their initial statements and then nothing.
getfiscal posted:stegosaurus posted:i guess the npc(oc) split already lol
theyre apparently in nyc, does anyone have any contact with them at allwhat did they split over? i only saw their initial statements and then nothing.
some sort of sexual harassment or something? its not clear.
stegosaurus posted:getfiscal posted:stegosaurus posted:i guess the npc(oc) split already lol
theyre apparently in nyc, does anyone have any contact with them at allwhat did they split over? i only saw their initial statements and then nothing.
some sort of sexual harassment or something? its not clear.
identity politics rears its ugly head
http://maosoleum.wordpress.com/2014/03/07/a-response-to-the-ncpoc-gender-whateverism-is-not-proletarian-feminism/
http://maosoleum.wordpress.com/2014/03/07/preliminary-statement-of-the-ncplc-regarding-the-split-with-the-ncpoc/
to be honest i have difficulty reading those because they are all in that weird commie tone, and i police tone
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
stegosaurus posted:yeah weird commie tone is really thick in those ones
hahaha glad i'm not the only one who thought that
The fake clandestinity pursued by the NCP(OC)...
Crow posted:i see those guys on facebook all the time, they're weirdos and are really into chauvinism or whatever. i'm pretty sure i saw them at an anti-war protest when the US was beating their drums for intervention, and they really enjoyed trying to cheerlead the procession & make people yell. then they did their cool teen hang out at union square while people made speeches & the fox news guys in ridiculous black pinstripe suits and unreal California 80s jackass faces tried to find agent provocateurs and loudmouth zionist shills to record
im sure you just met the bad ones.
ilmdge posted:Predating the launch of Sputnik by over a century (2), President Taylor’s task force, consisting of civil engineers and frontiersmen, constructs a rocket in the Californian wilderness, equips its payload with the most powerful camera known to humankind at the time - endowed with revolutionary colour-capturing capacity - and launches it skyward from the slopes of Mount Whitney (3).
guess who took the photo?
thats right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owens_Lake
the conclusion (marxist-humanist) seemed like it leaned heavily on some (post-)trotskyist assumptions about actually existing socialism. for example, kliman criticizes nationalizing banks as simply shifting the problem into the state sector because the economy is still regulated by profit-seeking enterprises. he says that socialism can't be built in one country because of the world-market and that state directives (lenin's postal service analogy) can't undo capitalist relationships. and he combines the above points to basically say there's no political solution to abolishing capitalism, in that people will have to seek new ways of relating first, and build worker's councils and such to facilitate those relationships afterwards. and the idea that the soviet or chinese experience might be desirable is sort of treated as crazy as usual.
ok so i guess my perspective on that is that the soviet union in its socialist period under stalin was not primarily defined by profit-seeking in any obvious way and that it did in fact build what could be called socialism. when profit-seeking was reintroduced in the subsequent decades it did become state-capitalism. that and the repression under stalin might be arguments against it, but they need to be seen as separate arguments than the reproduction of capitalism per se.
i haven't read the dunayevskaya stuff though that it's based on though.
e: is this idealist...
Edited by stegosaurus ()