The Meaning of Life, Part II

TIF for That: Comprehensive TIF Reform Coming to Chicago?

State Representative John Fritchey, who will be giving up his seat in the state house representing the 11th District to replace Forrest Claypool on the Cook County Board of Commissioners (assuming he wins in November), is teaming up with the Chicago Teachers Union and the Raise Your Hand Coalition to push comprehensive reform of the tax increment financing, or TIF, program. The reforms could end the exploitation of TIFs by the Mayor’s office as a cudgel, and restore significant funds to taxing bodies–particularly the schools–that have seen billions of dollars disappear over the last couple decades.

Tax increment financing was created by state statute in the 1970s as a way to provide incentives to develop blighted areas. TIF areas are designated by municipalities; within those areas, property tax assessments are frozen at the level they were at when the zone was designated. The land is still assessed and the taxes on the increase are still collected, but they are diverted into a site-specific fund rather than being paid to the various taxing bodies that typically collect them. Those bodies are, primarily, school districts, counties, the municipality itself, and sanitation and fire districts, among others. The idea is that without the incentive, that tax money would never have been raised in the first place, and so those taxing bodies are not actually losing anything.

Time for a Puppo

Well, it’s time for me to adopt a dog. I love them and the excuse that my apartment is too small (it’s really not–it’s actually fairly big as apartments go) doesn’t work anymore. But I need one small and snuggly and that is a little couch potato-ish because I won’t be home too much. Also I’m mildly allergic to fur, so one that is less sheddy would be good, too.

Thoughts?

Thank You

For saving me. I think I wanna stick around and see if I can grow.

“The Guide To Being Brown”, By Everybody Else

I had a clashing of two worlds that happens to brown people, particularly first generation brown people; this is when different groups of your friends collide. In this case it was some friends from work meeting some Assyrian friends of mine. Afterwards, one of my friends said I didn’t act like myself around my Assyrian friends.

“How do you know I’m not not acting like myself around you?” I asked. It wasn’t snide; I was honestly asking. To me, both selves are equally me.

This issue has been flogged to death; suffice to say that if you are white and have brown or black friends, please never tell them they’re “basically white.”

This is more common than you’d imagine, particularly for brown people of my ilk; I belong to a tiny ethnic group (less than 4 million worldwide) with no nation-state and who aren’t that phenotypicaly distinct from descendants of Europeans. There aren’t enough of us to generate stereotypes (except parochially–talk to people from West Rogers Park or Sodertalje). A creepy anthropological study of the people of northern Iraq (called “Southern Kurdistan” in the study) from the 1950s cataloged the Assyrian tribes and provided things like the average size of their skulls and chests, and the authors noted that many Assyrians are often “very light complected” and “could pass as Northern Europeans”. My mom for example has blonde hair, greenish eyes, and milky fair skin; my dad on the other hand is dark, has a prominent Semitic nose, and deep-set dark features. I’m undeniably brown. But because I skateboarded and listened to punk rock as well as hip hop, and shed my accent, when push came to shove people would be kind enough to inform me that I was “basically white”.

How cool is my mom? Studying science in Basra in the 60s.

I don’t want to discuss a struggle with identity or the prejudice (or advantages) I’ve had because I’m brown and working class. Again, that’s a boring story, boo hoo, sometimes things are hard. That’s not my point.

No, my point is that identity politics is hindering the ability of this society to move forward on almost every front of human relations. Identity politics both torments people of color and sincere whites, constricts the genders, and scatters and disrupts almost every effort at collective effort made by the left; and it is very consciously deployed to that end by powerful elites.

“Identity politics” is also one of those amorphous concepts that is easy to set up as a nemesis for whatever, better belief system one has. (Not dissimilar from calling someone a “reductionist”.) The identity politics that has wrought so much havoc builds out from the concept of “privilege” rather than a material definition of social relation to productive property (i.e., labor sellers and labor buyers). At a tactical level of politics (and policy) it emphasizes subjective, personal narratives as central to how society is ordered, and that encourages in-group behavior by generating cultural affinities and traditions. Various “anti-Imperialist” or “Third World” movements, including nationalisms of the more radical strains, are the archetypes.

The right wing pretends to hate identity politics but are expert practitioners of it; Sarah Palin is the pure distilled grain alcohol of that shit. I arrived at my distaste of identity politics honestly. It comes from being confronted by it while trying to do sincere community and labor organizing. Identity politics–appeals to race, ethnic, language, and religious in-group solidarity against outsiders–was deployed by powerful people to disrupt collective action. And it was used in a very ad hominem way, meant specifically to intimidate me and my comrades–of all races, men and women–out of trying to organize.

The Meaning of Life, Part I

Photo via Gapers Block

The Two Liars

The setting of this story.

In the Hakarra mountains, in a town called Lawando, there were two liars. One day they met in the town square, and the first liar said to the second,

“I have the best eyesight in the town.”

“So do I,” replied the second liar.

The first liar pointed to the distance. “For example, do you see that ant there on top of that mountain?”

The second liar craned his neck and squinted his eyes. “Do you mean the one with his eyes opened, or the one with his eyes closed?”

Is There a Leftist Case Against the State?

I feel the tension between liberals and the Left. Being on the political Left in the US puts you in uncomfortable position because the national conversation is extremely narrow, and liberals focused on day-to-day governance are pinched from both sides. Those on the broader Left–the “International Left”–come across as contrarians or as puritanical. Petty liberals–those who, broadly speaking, hew to the center-left line of the Democratic Party, embodied by the Brookings Institute, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, and public intellectuals like Matt Yglesias or Robert Reich, and politicians like Barack Obama and, formerly, Ted Kennedy–bristle as much at criticisms from the Left as they do to criticisms from the American right wing, and often are more defensive against those criticisms as they see them as coming from an attitude of “purity” or Utopianism.

Before getting to the problems with statism, it is useful to define what I mean by “liberals” and “the Left”.

It is hard to define terms in this debate, because the political spectrum is essentially fluid and the absence of ideological parties with specific manifestos confound categorization. In general terms, the petty liberal left is redistributionist and mildly statist; petty liberals don’t dispute that the foundations of American society are essentially just; rather, they seek to use extant institutions to address distributive problems.

Man, at Cape Disappointment: Love, Disappointment, and American Adventure

Why didn’t I learn from America?

I think I believed in the restorative properties of travel and adventure.

I thought, as America once did, that looking west, that adventure and sojourn, could heal what hurts, could mend what was broken, could give you the vision and wisdom and experience to make what was wrong, right. But it can’t. What is rotten still rots.

I imagine Thomas Jefferson wracked with worry about the unsolvable problem of the “peculiar institution” of slavery, and the bruising partisanship of the 1800 election, gazing westward and seeing in that expanse a salve. But discovery without can’t reverse or allay rotting within, can it?

Jefferson is both America’s mightiest revolutionary thinker and biggest hypocrite. The ideas embodied in The Declaration, the Summary View of the Rights of British North America, the Autobiography, and his personal semi-public correspondence with public intellectuals of the time would be expressed in some form by democratic revolutionaries for centuries afterward. The same man who owned inherited slaves wrote that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living” and that

[L]aws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the same coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

This from a man whose greatest political nemesis was not Alexander Hamilton or John Adams but John Marshall whose theories of judicial power allowed for just the type of flexibility Jefferson advocated for.

He was also probably America’s biggest debtor President, a fact that is more telling than at first blush. He suffered under immense debt his entire adult life, constantly wriggling his way out comeuppance, unable to finish the wildly expensive Monticello, and finding himself unable to manumit, or free, his slaves at his death due to his huge number of creditors. His procrastination and anxiety over his debt is mirrored in his attitude towards America’s chattel slavery system. He likened it to “[having] the wolf by the ears”, both unable to continue it nor end it.

Instead, he assumed unprecedented executive authority and expanded the American experiment, dispatching two young men, Lewis and Clark (or “Clarke” as it is in his letters), to physically explore America’s future, to provide a new challenge, a new adventure, to a young nation done with revolutionary fervor and in need of self-evaluation. I imagine Jefferson saw in that challenge the solution to the problem; that by committing America to an adventure of exploration and discovery, it could overwhelm with new experience the corrupting influence of its original sin.

Adventure and exploration is hard, but growing up is infinitely harder.

When your heart’s been broken, or things seem to be swirling downwards–that patina of anxiety creeps over you as everything you’ve tried at, you’ve failed at, or worse, you failed to try at, adventure is the solution. By getting out of your “element”, by throwing off your moorings and setting into unknown–you’ll get “distance” and “clarity” that will help you fix what hurts. Will you? There’s no doubt that getting away can help you with context and perspective, but that context and perspective can just as often make things worse as make things better.

Will International Competitions Become Anachronisms?

Following up on the previous post about sports and nationalism, I decided to take a look at some of the rosters for the best teams in the World Cup, looking at the two best teams in each group, with a focus on the “developing” nations.

Not surprisingly, these rosters are heavy with players who live and play in different countries–often different continents. Not only this, but you could show a direct correlation between the best players and the wealth of the nation in which they’re playing. Association football in its day-to-day form is organized around the capital in the game, not nation-states.

Nearly half of Mexico’s team plays in Europe, and two-thirds of Uruguay’s. None of Slovenia’s players play in Slovenia (contrast with Germany, where every single player plays in Germany). Only two of Serbia’s players play in Serbia (and they’re both back benchers). Half of Paraguay’s team plays in Europe, 20 of Brazil’s 23 the same, and just over half of Chile’s team the same. Many of these players (and more and more in recent years) left their home country in their teens and became a part of the popular culture (not to mention the upper class) of another country within a handful of years. To what degree these individual players are really “representing” the nation is questionable, isn’t it?