Flutterby™! : Utopian ramblings

Several days ago, CJ forwarded me David Graeber's essay "Hope In Common", and I've been sitting on it because on the one hand it's a good call to remember that states are just belief structures, and as we watch portions of this system self-destruct it's important to remember that we have the opportunity to rebuild those belief structures in a way that better serves us, and yet I believe that the underpinnings of the belief structure that Graeber proposes are fundamentally broken.

However, this morning Frank Paynter passed around De-Corporatizing the Panhandling Panjundrums, which just points out that the part of the reason that most of us are so unsympathetic to the bailouts of the automakers is that we see corporations, rather than the interlinked economy of our fellow citizens in the central states (even if those fuckers have generally been voting against our freedoms and liberties and for destroying the economy and the image of the U.S. abroad).

I think there's something there. Of course the reason that we're seeing self-interested fat white guys in suits panhandling in Washington is that they are generally just assholes who happened to get lucky who don't generally have a clue ("No one could have foreseen...", except for, maybe, Toyota, Honda, etc...), and who are begging so that we fund their corporate jets, but if they were sincere they'd start making the public face of this endeavor our fellow citizens. Of course that might mean actually changing the way that the automakers run from an adversarial one to one where everyone feels like they're on the same team, and the UAW is gonna fight that one as hard as GM's upper management, but a lad can dream.