Still looking for “green shoots”

If job losses were really slowing, one would expect them to stop at some point. Of course, this is not really the case. Based on dubious Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers, the proportion of the civilian, non-institutionalized population which is employed has been dropping on a trend that looks close to a straight line since August 2008. The portion of the population counted as part of the labor market continued to drop, though at a reduced rate from previous months, but still muting the rise in unemployment. Average working hours rose a bit.



The proportion of the population employed, having dropped below 1984 levels with the June numbers, is now at 59.15 percent. The 2000 peak was 64.40 percent. The portion of the population (a broader base than the BLS uses to calculate the unemployment rate) the BLS counts as unemployed is 6.32 percent, the highest proportion I see in the numbers, which I have from 1970 forward. The previous peaks were in 1982 at 6.20 percent and in June 2009 at 6.25 percent.

Whether you choose to believe the government, mainstream media spin, me, or the even gloomier Shadow Government Statistics, the fact remains that people are going to continue to have a hard time spending money and they will continue to have a hard time paying their bills. The accounts I’ve seen claim that 70 percent of U.S. gross domestic product is based on consumer spending. So apart from the cheer on Wall Street, this recovery is bogus.

Following football to tyranny

I saw a billboard today which read against a football field-like green AstroTurf background, “I follow football to freedom.” I thought, how sad.

Football as freedom means “freedom” within the confines of a field marked off with boundaries, which you are “out of bounds” if you cross, and in which players who move on their own time may be “off sides.” For a fan, actually following the game, it means “freedom” within the confines of a stadium, cheering on cue, aligning your own goals with the crowd around you; or within the bounds of the small screen often writ large with projection systems. The billboard is an advertisement for the National Football League on ESPN, so it clearly referred to the latter.

Freedom means different things to different people. To libertarians it means a freedom from constraints on action. To fundamentalists it means freedom from ideas that challenge their ideas. And for many fans, it means a respite from the pressures of a cruel world.

But football serves other purposes as well. Like the Boy Scouts, football puts people in uniform, conforming to a particular appearance. It teaches brutality, defining masculinity as physical performance and as toughness, “playing through the pain.” It teaches compliance; players who fail to follow instructions will likely find themselves sidelined. It ranks players by their physical capabilities; weaker players are also less likely to play.

Football thus values physical rather than intellectual performance, obedience rather than invention, and conformity rather than individual expression. It is, in short, perfect training for citizens of an authoritarian regime who are not to challenge authority and not to think for themselves. In later life, it serves as a relief, a harmless distraction from the oppression of a political and economic regime that rules through the fear of constant war and through long hours and numbing poverty.

It is a sign of the confidence of the regime that it would make its oppression so obvious.

The machismo of eating meat

Tonight, I saw a fellow vegan retweet a posting from an omnivore thumping his or her chest about it, saying to the effect that he (chest-thumping is more typically a male behavior; I assume accordingly) ate meat, he wasn’t going to change, and vegans should stop wasting their breath.

This is a troubling statement. And the response we vegans have to it is somewhat conflicted. A segment amongst us view the continuing slaughter of animals as a holocaust; from this, they infer a moral imperative to take any actions necessary to stop it. Some of us advocate nonviolence; I personally worry that framing the conflict as humans versus animals will backfire; animals will surely lose. Others see hypocrisy in using violence to stop violence. Still others extend a human right of self-defense to animals and those who would protect them. I doubt I have done justice to the wide range of views, but all of us, I think, would prefer to use persuasion.

Persuasion doesn’t always work. The ongoing hoopla over health care, for example, exhibits an irrationality which does not appear susceptible to peaceful means. And so the holocaust continues.

Whatever we think about the morality of treating animals as existing for human purposes, we should also acknowledge the incredible harm that the livestock industry does to the environment (summary here). According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, “livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport.” That’s not all. The livestock industry bears a heavy burden of blame for water usage, water pollution, land use, land degradation, deforestation, and biodiversity problems on our planet. While the FAO does not recommend the world switch to a vegan diet, the fact is that vegan diets would feed a lot more people, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and substantially improve our environment. But the trend lies in the opposite direction; we have a larger population and a larger proportion of them eating meat.

So people thump their chests about eating meat. But let’s consider the machismo associated with eating meat. Does it, in the vast majority of cases, reflect people hunting their food in any kind of a “fair fight?” Hunters are armed with high-powered rifles and plenty of ammunition; few animals threaten them in any way. And even they represent a tiny fraction of meat eaters. Does meat eating even reflect people butchering animals themselves, dealing with the blood and gore of a once living creature? Again, no. The vast majority leave the gore to someone else. They are buying meat at the grocery store. Hunting is reduced to scanning the frozen foods section for a frozen pizza. And given persistent gender roles, it isn’t even Mr. Macho Man doing that.

So, what exactly is all this chest-thumping about? Are people really so proud of destroying our planet, our species’ only home? Do we really want that portion of our planet not already buried under concrete plowed over to raise feedstock? And while it might make fireworks displays a little more explosive, do we really want our air filled with methane gas? Do hunters want forests and wild places destroyed and rivers filled with excrement?