This weekend I’m attending the LaborTech conference in San Francisco. I’ve been excited about this all week. The goal of this conference is to put social media, video, web, and cellphone training into the hands of the people who most need it: the workers who are trying to contest the “key messages” put out by corporations and the mainstream media.

I can’t believe how much I’ve learned in just a few hours. LaborTech is an International conference, so there are workers and organizers from all over the world.

One of the things I learned about was how Samsung, the most powerful corporation in South Korea (and prominent on a world scale as well), has been spying on its workers and using unbelievable union-busting tactics. For instance, Samsung management used the “Friend-Finding” GPS service to track workers and pinpoint  where worker’s gathered to attempt to unionize. One of the first things I’m going to do when I get home this evening is write Engadget and other gadger review blogs to let them know how Samsung treats its workers: anyone who wants to put their consumer behavior behind upholding human rights should avoid buying anything from Samsung. I’m going to try to get a clip of the Samsung labor movement video to put on YouTube.

This conference is really focusing on video. There was an excellent video by Vivian Price on female construction workers in Japan. There was also a video on the months of labor revolution in Oaxaca, which includes the worker takeover of local radio and TV stations. There was a great sign that showed the LAW radio station being renamed LAW OF THE PEOPLE.

Mark Libkuman, an open source development planner who is speaking as I type this, lost a good friend in Oaxaca.

Here’s a pic of Steve Zeltzer, the Bay Area labor leader who was kind enough to invite me to LaborTech:

I have more pictures here.   In the ongoing adventure in irony that is my life, my camera batteries just died. :-p Hopefully I can pick up some batteries over lunch and there will be more pictures tonight.

There’s no question that labor is where the netroots will be happening next simply because of the sheer failure of the media to report their perspective or the facts they have to contest corporate propaganda.

Update: Nancy Bupp, a labor educator, reviewed the current state of employer surveillance technology. SCARY!!!

I’m shaking with anger right now.

After a week of storm and stress, the Board of Trustees of the California State Univeristy system has vote to merely scale back the one-year-of-pay-for-no-work golden parachute for top Univesity administrators. Why do these scions of the super-privileged think they are entitled to a public subsidy of hundreds of thousands of dollars?

…the perk is vital because it allows “a dignified way” for CSU executives, including campus presidents, to step down from their well-compensated positions.

Well, I have a thing or two to say, nay SCREAM, about treating dignity as a perk of the executive lifestyle.

First, you’d think the dignity that comes with raking in a salary 35x the minimum wage (or more) would be enough. When you earn several hundred thousand dollars a year, you get a nice house, nice clothes, nice gadgets, a nice car. All those status symbols encourage others to defer to you. You don’t have to approach people for favors - people approach you because doing you favors might get them into the crony circle.

And there’s not much need for a golden parachute when one executive job is likely to lead to another one. So you don’t get to be SVP of Lockheed for a while? On $300,000 you could live like retiree on Social Security for 15-20 years and enjoy the fishing. But why even use that principle when your time in the executive suite stuffed your pension stocking?

And let’s not forget how the UC executives acquired their positional power in the first place: most of them dined off the tall white male advantage all their lives.

For the love of Mike, Pete, and the Magdalen! Wrong, wrong, wrong…

Now let’s talk about who the salary-padded UC executive is STEALING from. The U.C. graduate schools are extremely poorly endowed. In the humanities, where time to dissertation can run over ten years, most students are lured in with a year of fellowship funding and then forced to to take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans (on top of work that may or may not be related to their academic progress) in order to get their Ph.D. When I was in graduate school, I took out these loans and worked for several years as an eldercare assistant - and I still didn’t end up with my doctorate because a powerful department administrator sneakily transferred a fellowship I had been nominated for to a student he preferred: and by the time I found out, it was too late to make other arrangements. I was in such a precarious position that I couldn’t cope with the months of bureaucracy once my department wouldn’t immediately correct the situation. My hair was already gray from several starvation periods. My life had been reduced to an eternal round of humiliating and hopeless meetings with profs who had already decided the current was against me. Was there a plan in place to transition out of grad school in a DIGNIFIED way? No, I left grad school to temp around, and generally fail at the rest of my life.

No doubt this story can be echoed by many graduate students chewed up and spit out by the UC system.

And let’s talk about the working poor, whose underpay subsidizes the lifestyle of the self-absorbed jet set. Does America give a fig about the dignity of the millions of people who sweep their floors, wash their clothes, change the diapers on their babies, and harvest their food? No - we’re all freaked out that our taxes might go toward the janitor’s entitlements. Oh the horror!

Well if entitlements for the poor are a moral hazard, then entitlements for the rich are the crying shame of our times. Dignity isn’t a perk of celebrity and attention: it’s a universal human right, and we need to start restoring it from the bottom up.

***

More info on the California State University situation:

Chancellor fights for the Perks

Faculty Sues CSU over Perks

I confess: I broke my vow to never, ever watch John Stossel last night in order to see all my worst fears confirmed about the way things really work. I watched Privilege in America, or yet another Nip/Tuck Ugly Betty Devil Wore Prada HOWL about how pretty rich people have it better. Stossel hit all the highlights of the brewing revolt of the fairly rich (usually posing as the “middle class”), though he carefully avoided talking about the 35.9 million Americans living in poverty whose underpaid labor has long subsidized the middle class lifestyle.

I haven’t been around for a few weeks because I’m really tired. But let me offer this twist: I’m tired because of the efforts of well-meaning people who care about me. As usually, the conversation finally came around to why a bright, highly-skilled, and very nice person like me can’t get work in a booming economy. Since no one feels they can do anything about BushCo’s rigged numbers, the diagnosis was it’s all my fault: I don’t try hard enough, I’m not putting enough time and money to make myself attractive, and I’m not making a major effort to socialize.

After looking longingly at my various unfinished creative projects, my only source of happiness, I subordinated myself to the outlook of my friends who “know better” in that truthiness kind of way.

I made an effort to go out more and meet people. This is inevitably pretty painful for me, because bar-hopping is expensive for someone who has no regular income, and the historical record shows that the investment will be futile. I make very few friends this way - but I do get to go through a lot of rejection, a lot of people overtly leaving me off their lists for group gatherings even when I finally stop hoping to be embraced and ask to be included, and occasionally a few people who take serious advantage of my needy position.  

The reason this happens is that I’m seen as someone who has nothing to offer. This isn’t about my confidence or paranoia or any other psychological trickiness. It’s about the cold fact that I’m not that attractive, I don’t have money or other forms of class access, I don’t have many social connections or any influence, and whatever talent, skills, or intelligence I have don’t matter because they aren’t expressed in a social context. This isn’t the distorted perceptions of someone who lacks confidence. This isn’t paranoia. It’s the plain truth, and frankly it hurts me more when people try to pretend that this is something I can overcome with a little extra effort and a makeover.  

This reject-status doesn’t just mean I’m not invited to the party - it means I don’t even get the benefit of the relationships I pay for. I spent seven years of graduate school trying to get an advisor for my dissertation. I would go into professor’s office hours with a raft full of questions and potential contributions and avid interest in their work…to be met with icy silence - and the experience of listening to the next student be treated very differently while I gathered my books out in the hall. It wasn’t because I lacked merit or was deficient in my academic work - it was because I couldn’t bring the fellowships, connections, or any other sign of a “bright future” to those professors. I wore myself down trying to fight the administrator of my department who did everything in his power to make me drop out (and he eventually succeeded).

In fact, my harrowing experience with graduate school is why my hair was prematurely gray before I hit thirty. It’s from nutritional deficiencies related to several starvation periods because I didn’t have an advisor to sponsor me for work in my own department. This gray hair is now one of my “social deficits” that well-meaning people insist that I have to “fix” - i.e., though I’m usually out of work, I should be paying to have my hair professionally dyed and styled on a regular basis. Dishing out blame isn’t going to help anything - I just need to accept the fact that poor people who have had their looks hijacked by society have to pay more to meet society’s standards of attractiveness.

So after seeing my attempts at socializing weren’t really working, and just draining the little IRA I started while working and attempting to be a good citizen, my friends started getting antsy about what else I should do…i.e. my hair, my nails, my weight, my teeth, better-fitting clothes. When all their hinting didn’t lead to a shopping spree and a makeover, the hints became a “birthday present”. I got my hair professionally done, and now I have to put up with the constant pressure to keep paying to “keep it up”. I bet the “present” to get my nails done is just around the corner.

My hair does look better…but it’s not doing anything to change my life. It’s not getting me “over the top” in job interviews. The people who were repulsing me from their social circles are still repulsing me.

The thing is, I could have told my well-meaning friends this wouldn’t work in advance. I know because I’ve been through this over, and over, and over again. Everytime I meet someone new, they look at my sorry condition in life and try to figure out what I can do to help myself. This usually involves a regimen of (expensive) self-improvement and socialization. These people project what worked for them onto me. This usually comes with an urban legend about how a poor thirty-fourth cousin invested their last dollar in a nice suit, talked themselves up, engaged in some telephone-rounds scam where they told each person that someone else “wanted them” or “already agreed to it”, and ended up with a plum job/promotion/book deal/angel investor/etc.

Worst of all, these friends are demanding that I shut down my ability to learn from the past. As much as the U.S. has promoted a society of continuous learning, our dirty secret is we don’t want anyone learning anything if their experience tells them to stop jumping through the social hoops that work for the top ten percent. All of that good advice doled out to people to be confident, to network, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and not let the bastards get them down…that’s all about defying the record of experience. Repressing your memories and functioning as if you haven’t experienced rejection doing the same thing ten times over is really, really hard work. It’s draining. I’d even propose this is a root cause of major depression.

However, I go through the motions because the well-meaning self-appointed life coach will be my friend as long as I do what they say. Pointing out the truth will be end of that relationship.

In sum, emulating privilege is not going to make me privileged. Not everyone can be privileged. Everyone is trying to optimize their social networks and maximize their filters for a good reason: the current social scenario is that you have to be privileged just to survive. However, the privileged cannot exist, by definition, without the not-privileged. And there’s not a virtuous circulation of privilege that gives everyone a turn, either. Privilege breeds more privilege and lack of privilege accumulates the problems that keep you down.

As the Victorians used to say, the Poor Will Always Be With Us.

Some people like me get filtered out. Automatically. It’s time to DEAL WITH IT.      

Everyone wants to be communicators and visionaries, to “raise awareness” of problems that everyone already knows about. All of this is tap-dancing around the core issue: redistribution of wealth. No one wants to talk about solutions because it involves dirty words like taxes and the image of Big Brother reaching into your wallet to filch your hard-earned money.

The only way to solve problems like mine, though, is to guarantee a minimum survival kit, including either the right to work or the right to be subsidized when you’re denied work. This is the point where people’s eyes usually glaze over and they start talking about Magical Macroeconomics. And that’s where the people who have not only fallen through the cracks, but are being held down there, start to hear nothing but, “Blah, blah, blah…” There is no dodging the ultimate truth: if there’s no work and no subsidy for not working, then people starve and die. All other options besides guaranteeing work or subsidies for no work make us a country of murderers. Dropping dead of stress and preventable disease is just as bad as holding a gun up to them and shooting them. Diffusing responsibility throughout  society changes nothing for a dead person.

Redistribution of wealth is not about ideology, it’s about fairness. It’s about giving back some of the hay you made out of your privileges, and doing it in a way that hits everyone’s pockets in a fair way. It’s about recognizing that our social system runs on privilege and filtering. And it’s about realizing that trying to force people to adjust their attitudes to compensate for homelessness or hunger is a form of mental torture. Let’s strive to be a better country than that, and vote for the political representatives who want us to be a better country than that.

Last night I attended a showing of the Motherhood Manifesto documentary. This documentary highlights the work of MomsRising.org, a growing movement with over 50,000 members - and particularly their effort to end employment discrimination against mothers.

I’m all for ending that discrimination - my own mother was denied a job because she was asked a question to determine whether she had daughters or sons (one of the benefits the employer offered would have been considerably more expensive for daughters). Yet I was left with a subtle feeling of increased anomie after the show. 24 hours of thinky thoughts later, I think I know the source of my discomfort, and I also have a new outlook on business and labor law.

To provide some background, the big red hot button on my political activist agenda is dignity in the workplace, including improved support for job transitions. In the current (lack of) system, people spend far too much uncompensated time, effort, anxiety, and humiliation on job transition periods. When that transition goes on for longer than a few months, I think words like “slavery” should start to come into play - especially when there is ongoing free labor (to “prove yourself”) or free work product and/or consulting involved. I appreciate the risk of trivializing the word slavery, but given the physical suffering that can be involved with deprivation of health care and demeaning treatment by others, I think we’re getting closer to a slave system than most Neo-Con economists would care to admit.

I’m a proponent of “blind hiring” - a new hiring process that would take names off resumes, remove pictures and “first impression” personal interviews from the process, and do away with the crony-based recommendation system. I’d like to reduce the focus on networking. Instead, I’d like to see an increased focus on skills: not just more training, but more emphasis on making skills visible through free or cheap credentialing. I also think steps should be taken early to prevent temp agencies from being used as buffers that enable businesses to avoid anti-discrimination laws. I believe businesses that cling to more personal forms of hiring are really casting about for excuses to practice discrimination - unfortunately perceived as a “gut feeling”.

Given my intense interest in the subject of fair employment,  I should probably be the chief bullhorn wielder for MomsRising.org. Discrimination against mothers is a widespread, egregious, and stupid form of discrimination that has been leaving a trail of family wreckage for decades.

Today I realized the problem is that this is still just one form of discrimination - and when we finally do something to alleviate it, the suffering will just be transferred to some other group in a competitive economy. For instance, studies show overweight white women face  significant pay discrimination. If the overweight white Moms get a boost, will the overweight white single women be in even worse condition? While it’s true that the Mom’s have childcare responsibilities, what about the people with massive eldercare responsibilities?

In short, it seems like there are myriad forms of discrimination, and they all create human suffering and undermine families. And every time our political representatives get it together to finally pass a law against some form of discrimination, they just end up with yet one more layer of regulation - leaving businesses howling about the skyrocketing costs of compliance and fostering a cottage industry in loophole-lawyering.

One of the tenets of socially responsible entrepreneurship is to “leave no one behind and hold no one back.” It seems to me that the best way to follow through on this sentiment would be to eliminate all forms of discrimination from the hiring process in one fell swoop. This would decrease the costs of compliance and take a lot of the song and dance out of the hiring process, therefore greasing the wheels of the economy and pumping up productivity by capturing a lot of labor that’s just going to waste right now. (Really, how does the general economy benefit from 100 rewrites of one’s resume and a thousand personalized thank-you notes? It’s the social equivalent of busywork.)

Here’s my idea. Why don’t we regulate what can be asked during a job interview instead of what can’t be asked? In stead of having 2,376 obscure anti-discrimination laws on the books, why not simply write an interview guide that excludes all personal and family questions? If there were a standardized format for interviews (with a “fill in the appropriate skill set here” section), then it would also be easier for people to prepare for interviews. If “blind hiring” policies were also implemented, then we might make strides toward eliminating discrimination all together. And think of the compliance savings! This alone would be putting billions of dollars back into the actual businesses.

It seems to me that the only obstacle to such a policy is people are scared of the unknown: no matter what people profess their values to be, they secretly want to hold on to opportunities to discriminate because it helps them hold on to power over other people. While the unknown is scary, power feels like safety. I guess the only way to overcome this is to promise that by reducing discrimination, you make everyone safer, which thus reduces the desperation for power.

If there are any lawyers or policymakers in the house, I’d like to know if there’s any reason standardizing job interviews wouldn’t be less expensive than dealing with all the anti-discrimination laws. It seems obvious to me.

After reading the WaPo article on the YouTube Whistleblower, I hope this statement from the Project on Government Oversight gets the widest dissemination possible:

The formal systems that whistle-blowers are expected to use have failed. That’s why you’re seeing people be creative like this…This is a tremendous way for someone brave enough to do it to say something directly and not have to go through a filter.

In my humble opinion, “filter” is not a strong enough word: perhaps “impregnable barricade” would be more accurate.

More after the jump. Previous Agonist story here.

If anyone hasn’t seen it, the whistleblower video is here.  He lays out his case very well, and he will probably be luckier than most whistleblowers in getting a hearing.

This is a Homeland Security whistleblower who is addressing problems with coastguard ships. Here’s a summary of the issues from Slashdot:

1) Not enough security cameras (big blind spots)
2) Bad (unshielded) communications cables
3) Equipment won’t survive the extreme temperatures
4) No one cares, billions of dollars and national security at risk.

(The video especially points out how the unshielded communications cables leads to all sorts of eavesdropping.)

As many have pointed out, whistleblowers ruin their career when they speak out, and this has consequences for their friends and family. Corporations are increasingly resorting to preemptory retaliation on people who just have the potential to become whistleblowers (i.e. by raising a complaint) - just so they will be able to call the whistleblower “disgruntled” and distract the public from corporate misconduct.

Our current civic infrastructure is unfortunately tilting toward enabling corporations to hide the evidence. Employees have every incentive to look the other way - to leave security flaws in place, to leave safety problems for post-disaster investigation, to let fraudsters confiscate the retirement savings of thousands of people, and to let the “next poor slob” suffer by abandoning a bad situation instead of addressing it. Subordinate employees are pressured to be bystanders and to enable the worst behavior through lies of omission. Sure there are people willing to be martyrs…but are their enough?

It’s not enough to refrain from abetting the corporate PR machine and refusing to attack the whistleblower. There need to be positive, concrete measures to protect whistleblowers: advocacy and active legal reinforcement, employment assistance, and community support.  

I’ve seen some mockery of the poor guy’s plea for a lawyer at the end of the video. The people who think this is lame probably don’t understand just how difficult it is to get a lawyer in these situations. Moreover, government enforcement agencies are no help at all in arranging for legal protection even when their are whistleblower provisions in place. The whistleblower has probably been looking for many months.

Even if you can’t hook the whistleblower up with a lawyer or a potential employer, the least people can do is to let the guy know you understand and support what he’s doing - that you know how corporations block and tackle, that you know government agencies are ineffective, that you know lawyers are scarce and he will have to bare the burden of mounting legal costs, and that you know the media is plagued by corporate PR and shady “experts” determined to malign the character of whistleblowers. This guy is being besieged by “balanced” media coverage right now, which will eternally question his motives and approach. He would probably welcome the opportunity to address any questions raised by the media coverage, especially if there’s no lawyer involved yet. You can send him a comment via his YouTube profile or his slashdot account, and if I find a better means of contacting him, I’ll put the information here.

Note: I have not mentioned the whistleblower’s name, which is now all over the media, because he’s going to be haunted for the rest of his life about what people will turn up when they Google him. I don’t want to add to his problems, and I hope other people will keep this in mind for their comments here and elsewhere.

One of the problems with establishing dignity as a fundamental value is that everyone’s idea of dignity is different. My friend Bob Fuller has been attempting to define it in the breach as the removal of rankism. Recently, I’ve been trying to supplement this abstract approach by enumerating specifics. As I jotted down images and ideas, a common theme emerged. I realized that the one thing I needed most to be able to maintain my sense of dignity in life was the ability to preserve my integrity.

The idea that I put integrity first explains a lot in my life, and the constant pressure to sacrifice my integrity explains why I never feel like I’m living in dignity. I often feel like I’ve been asked to choose between integrity and survival: choosing the former threatens my survival, while choosing the latter guarantees my indignity.

A recent conversation gave me cause to ponder the order of my values. We were discussing how job interviews work, with an eye to why I compulsively sabotage myself. The fact I hate job interviews like the plague was no excuse. Everyone hates job interviews, but since people have to work 99.9% just bite the bullet and do it. What makes me different from them? Why should I be the exception to the hazing that everyone else has to go through?

I hope my very smart friend won’t mind if I quote him exactly, because I think he nailed the common outlook:

I am not a good interviewee. But having sat on the other side of the table, I have become better. Because I realized that it’s a game, and what we’re looking to see is that

1) you are competent
2) your personality is agreeable and isn’t going to piss everyone else off.
3) you are socialized well enough to corportations to play the bullshit game. For example, one question we always ask is “do you prefer to work alone or as part of a group?”

The correct answer is “both”.

We know it is BS, the interviewee knows it is BS. But the game is to say it sincerely, smile and tell us how you like both.

Now despite knowing this I’m still not very good, because I have an allergy to BS that I can’t entirely control. But that’s the game.

Competent, likeable, socialized.

For a long time I’ve wondered why the current employment system persists. If everyone hates job interviews, and everyone understands the reason is the distortions mentioned above, why don’t we find a better system? Is hazing more than a metaphor here? Are we just all struggling to get to a position where we can put others through what we went through?

This is idle speculation on my part because I’ve never been a hiring manager. All I know is no matter how much I want the job, I find some small way to rebel against it every time. I always find a way to express my discomfort with the very circumstances of the interview - from admitting I put integrity first to just looking very uncomfortable about “probing” questions.

Choosing integriy goes against the advice of all my friends. They see my choices as quixotically impractical, self-defeating, or at least self-punishing. Everyone accepts that people need to “get along” first, and to refuse to do what you have to do to get along is the equivalent of asking the rest of the world to pick up your slack. (For instance, if you can’t afford insurance, society ends up picking up your tab when you go to the county hospital). As a very good friend put it recently, I’m not in a place where I can afford the luxury of integrity. I should put integrity off until I have a safety net.  

So why do I put integrity first? I have some theories based on my personal history which I’ll spare everyone. There’s another aspect of my last-ditch defense of integrity that I think may be a universal reaction to this day and age. We are all being asked to constantly adapt to change, constantly chase the cheese. Most of us are in debt (student loans, mortgages, car payments) and this compels us to submit to others so they will “give” us work. Our skills don’t determine the compensation for that work - the market determines are compensation. Furthermore, corporations have the power (through lobbying, litigation, and PR) to jimmy the market in ways that decrease the power of the individual. In other words, everyone feels the rug can be pulled out from under them at any minute. Under those circumstances, the only thing individuals can protect is their sense of self. Integrity is the primary component of a sense of self. To be treated with dignity is for the rest of the world to respect your ownership of yourself. To be forced to sacrifice your integrity just to survive is slavery.

Back to the problem of the job interview: when push comes to shove I believe, with all the power of the deepest spiritual belief, that the job interview itself is a test of my integrity. Every interviewer is asking me whether I would put “fitting in” before everything else. I can’t say “yes” to that, either directly or indirectly.

Worse, if I feel everyone who “passed” the interview did say “yes” to the implied question of whether they would put their integrity second, that means the entire workplace will be populated by people of questionable integrity. Every wonder why we end up with so many psychopaths at the top? It’s because the interview process screens out people who put integrity first at the bottom. This also explains groupthink and turf wars - the interview process selects for people who are either utterly conformists or fantastic liars. I don’t want to work in an environment where I feel surrounded by people who put “fitting in” first.

I apologize if everyone who has a job now feels insulted: I do think that there is a widespread gut instinct about this problem which is reflected in the fact that most everyone hates job interviews. I don’t think people are evil because they need to get a job.

So what makes me different? Am I just so special that I don’t have to do what everyone else does?

I think the difference is I subconsciously made the connection between integrity and dignity. I realized my life had no dignity, and I haven’t figured out how to get it back. Hopefully this won’t sound like hyperbole, but I’m not sure life is worth living if you’re obligated to live in a state of indignity. Since I’m living in indignity now, I guess I’m just waiting for it to be over.

I wonder how many people out there feel the way I do?

Over the last few weeks a number of articles on Daily Kos called attention to Garcetti vs. Ceballos, where retaliation for reporting discipline was outrageously restyled as managerial discipline. The issues range from free speech to enabling government corruption to the chill on whistleblowers.

I have nothing to add but gratitude for all who recognized immediately that any decision that give employees reason to be afraid to report fraud, negligence, and incompetence to their superiors will be a savage blow to the public good. I’m only here today to do my citizen’s duty and pass on that on Thursday, June 29th, National Whistleblower Center Chairman Stephen Kohn will be testifying before the House Committee on Government Reform about the ramifications of Garcetti v. Ceballos. Please note this link includes the handy-dandy Capwiz link to write your political representatives and let them know that you resent every move our government makes toward establishing the Orwellian state.

I’m heartened by the title of the The Human Dignity Act - legislation to extend at least some Federal labor law to the U.S. territory of the Marianas. While The Human Dignity Act is a specific response to Tom DeLay and K Street corruption, I think it implicitly affirms that respect for labor is still an American value.

We all need to hear that affirmation in light of BushCo’s ongoing quest to turn the clock back to the good old days of slave labor. While relentlessly exhorting the masses to the Protestant Work Ethic, what the Bush Crony Class really has in mind is the other American history of the quasi-feudal plantation system - where people flocked to the Colonies for the opportunity to become a gentile landowner, relieved manual labor by cheap, docile dependents.

In the U.S., fueling economic expansion has become an end in itself. Human beings are mere fodder for this process. While weasel-eyed Bush cronies proclaim the moral uplift of tough competition, no one really dwells on what happens to the losers in this process. People are just expected to “keep trying” until they are institutionalized either through the prison system or the mental health system. According to these rules, you either do what you have to do to win or you’re subjected to chronic indignity.

It’s time to refocus the shame where it belongs: on the people who are advocating and upholding this system of top predator exploitation and plunder. Government and corporate employers need to go beyond giving lip service to policies that respect and defend labor - they should get serious about enforcing them.

Take this case of sexual harrassment: the managers elected to look the other way and left their vulnerable subordinate to deal with the ranky panky on her own.

Today the Supreme Court did the right thing by reducing the personal risk involved in filing a sexual harassment complaint and, moreover, making it easier to enforce all anti-discrimination law. By upholding Sheila White’s claim of retaliation:

…the justices defined retaliation as any action taken by an employer that would intimidate “a reasonable employee” into backing off from a discrimination complaint.

The next step is for workers to rise up and demand justice wherever this intimidation occurs. This would be a significant step toward asserting the dignity of our labor and finding the common ground to repel the predations of the Crony Class.

The introduction to my edition of The Tale of Genji describes the author Murasaki Shikibu’s father as a “man who was either unable or unwilling to form and preserve the patronage relationships necessary for bureaucratic advancement…”

This struck a sharp chord for me, because I tend to chose to go with the truth of a situation instead of promoting the personal will of those in a position to guarantee my livelihood. I’ve often pondered why I don’t act according to my economic self-interest. It’s not only anti-Darwinian - it seems to go against the U.S. cultural consensus and the consistent advice of all who care about me. Everyone insists “networking” and “relationships with key people” are the main path to employment and political existence, and all who shirk the social game must be inherently self-destructive or just stupid (or, in business-speak, “needs coaching in social skills“).

During the past few weeks the call for government intervention to preserve net neutrality has once more stirred up my thoughts on what creates pressure to seek patronage. Ever since 9/11 I’ve been worried about the problem of trading freedom for safety - particularly the freedom of speech. However, I’m now even more worried that if we go too far in dismantling government, individual freedom will be all but demolished by corporate interests, mafias, and roving street gangs. Individual freedom isn’t the default: it needs to be actively protected.

The freedom of the individual is being betrayed by the civic culture that now dominates the U.S. Jared Bernstein has described how YOYO economics has maximized the freedom of a few well-placed individuals at the expense of the many. On the cultural side, Robert Fuller has been arguing how rankism places relentless pressure on people to turn to patrons, fueling an epic expansion of indignity. I’ve been arguing that the New Puritans are seeking to block the marginalized from putting their opinions on record, invoking risk to potential patronage relationships. Note the underlying problem of all of this is that people are increasingly turning to the patronage system, while resistance to the patronage system leads to ostracization and homelessness.

Not since the days of corvee labor have average individuals been so powerless in society. Everyone feels dependent on a corrupt employment system. But, moreover, the nation of “nobodies” has no recourse when corporate interests infringe on their most basic civil and human rights. This might be because the powerful forces of our society are not answerable to any institution charged with protecting the rights of each and every individual. The media has become a purveyor of corporate messaging, the legal system is impossible for regular people to cope with even though most can’t afford a lawyer to do the coping for them, and the State can run roughshod over the rights of the individual now that our ostensible “representatives” don’t bother to help constituents unless a good photo op or a bribe is involved. Individual financial viability is being eroded by enormous systems of theft, from health care price gouging to corporate litigation herding into mass settlement centers. While “public interest” groups such as the ACLU seem to be protecting individuals, they actually only help people if it serves their policy agenda.

No wonder everyone feels like they are puppets forced to play out someone else’s lie. And frankly, the current Democratic emphasis on “framing” just reinforces this feeling of being squeezed into a mold of unreality. Even blogging only gives a few people a serious megaphone to stand up for their truth, and this just underscores the plight of those without a megaphone. Why should a megaphone be required? Why do we need to tarry for people in the streets (not to mention fake mobs)?

Big government can be costly and oppressive, especially when the checks and balances fail. However, if we throw out government all together, we will quickly find ourselves in a new feudal age where patronage-seeking and constant indignity are the only possible way of life.

Over the last year there has been a torrent of media articles intended to discipline (or terrorize) people into using what the power elite considers to be “good judgment” in the presentation of your online self. This reminds me of the early Puritans scurrying across the wilderness with a mission to scold and rebuke all those who weren’t toeing the line for the theocratic Millenium.

CNet struck the gusher of contemporary fear, loathing, and perpetual irony when Elinor Mills googled Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. Ever since then, the mainstream media has been obsessed with “digital dirt”, preaching to the reprobate bloggers and warning parents that their children will be damned to unemployment for their injudicious use of MySpace, Facebook, and other social sites (nope, I’m not going to clue the snooping Puritans in).

This week the New York Times hit with the old one-two punch. First sticking your neck out in the public space is a threat to your livelihood. Second, the Internet is a playground for stalkers. All that was missing from the set was the ever-popular screed against the Internet as a moral hazard that facilitates goofing off in the workplace, therefore undermining the Puritan work ethic.

Despite widespread interest in privacy and defending the few individual rights we have left, public response to this elite reformism has been muffled at best. I think some of the confusion stems from the idea the Internet is a public space: of course your employer, an army of marketers, random stalkers, and men in black are as free to seek you out as anyone. Sure your presence is amplified and perma-recorded in that public space, which leads to the reasonable conclusion that the glitterati have always known: you can’t get the benefits of visibility without being prepared to fend off the dangers.

Most people, of course, don’t command the social influence, legal resources, or public relations personnel that celebrities wield to cope with attacks on their reputation in public space. The Puritan Reformers of this age as well as the 17th century are concerned above all with everyone else’s reputation. In the previous Puritan heyday of 17th-century England, it was common to go to court for just being called a rude name in the street. Today this is rarely a feasible option, and frankly I don’t think using the MSM megaphone to shout “Repent, Sinners!” is going to rollback the Information Age, either.

I’d like to propose another way to look at our online over-exposure. It’s not only “public space” - it’s a form of civic “third space” - i.e., a place for socializing and discussion that is apart from family and apart from the workplace. The third space used to happen in the market, at church, and in the local pub. Now it happens on the Internet, too.

The third space is publicly accessible, but it is not a standing invitation to be attacked or abused. When the people who have power over you seek you out for the purposes of threatening your livelihood or putting pressure on your political opinions, that’s abuse.

While I’m sure there are a stampede of lawsuits just around the corner that will ultimately persuade the beancounters in risk management to discourage corporate HR from stalking hapless personnel, I would rather see the monied elite rethink the New Puritanism, and, instead, make a move in the direction of progressive leadership. For instance, at the next Business Ethics Summit, the big decision-makers could pledge to establish corporate policies to forbid snooping into the private lives of either potential or existing employees. They could instead declare themselves to be in favor of free public discourse and support the emerging third space. The sort of heavy-handed discipline imposed in the workplace is often counter-productive and stressful during working hours: it’s certainly inappropriate, if not inhuman, to extend the New Puritanism into the “third space”, too.