Socialist Saturday in the park

Yesterday I was riding in a cab driving by Hakim, a young man who came to the U.S. eleven years ago from Kenya. During the cab ride to downtown KC, we discussed the many businessmen who treat professional sports like a religion. Many of them spend several thousands of dollars per year for the privilege of showing up several times per week to watch millionaire-athletes play games while eating $6 hotdogs and drinking $8 cups of beer. The conversation then turned to some of the many things one can do without spending much money, as well as many alternative ways to spend the $4,000 you might spend to watch a package of baseball games over the course of a season. Hakim works to support his family here in the United States, but he sends an extra $200 per month to Kenya each month, which fully supports his widowed sister and her three children. Hakim is also going to school to learn computer programming. He was a thoughtful and enterprising fellow and I really enjoyed our conversation. I continued thinking about money and healthy ways of spending discretionary time this morning at the Tower Grove Farmer's Market, in Tower Grove Park, near my home in St. Louis, Missouri. But then it struck me that there was a lot of ugly low-priced socialism going on all around me. You see, the government runs the park, inviting families to come swim in a big fountain and shop for food directly from farmer-vendors, no corporate middle-men and no heavy-handed corporate sponsors taking control of the natural ebbs and flows of those who attend (though a few good-hearted local businesses pitch in to make the event possible). I took the following photo of the many socialists splashing in the fountain (I tweaked it with Photoshop, trying to make it artsy and also because I wanted to obscure the identities of the folks in the photo. BTW, feel free to click to enlarge the image). fountain-rendered-as-sponge-drawing As I drove to the park on a government-paid road, I had passed a government-paid (socialist) police officer. It occurred to me that this sort of socialism is not unusual. There is both a socialized fire department and a a socialized library near the park, as well as many socialized (public) schools. Then, to exacerbate the situation, Steve Albers showed up, unpaid, to provide live music (disclosure: Steve is my brother-in-law). Steve, who is an excellent blues musician but a confused capitalist, decided to put out a bucket for cash donations--all of it to go to the organizer of the market so that it could hire out other local professional music acts on future weekends. Image by Erich Vieth Bottom line: a government operated park, no heavy-handed corporate sponsors, free music, free fountain, donations for future non-profit endeavors. People self-organizing without the assistance of any corporate mascot, without anyone telling them how to have fun. Lively and thoughtful conversation everywhere. Children spontaneously dancing, with dedicated parents nearby. Tall trees, fresh air and the recurring thought that this is what life is really about. Ubiquitous healthy food. The honest and spontaneous power of the grass roots--people choosing to be the people they are. I'm hearing Chicago's "Saturday in the Park" as I write this. I've seen the dour faces of the people who attend high-priced "fun" at corporate entertainment, while slurping their $8 beer. They are people who are barraged with advertisements all over the stadium, and they are constantly being told when to applaud by a corporate-sponsored scoreboard and PA. Image by Erich Vieth They are carefully searched on the way into the stadium to make damned sure that they don't bring in their own alcoholic drinks (oh, year, 12% of this expensive and unnecessary new stadium was constructed using taxpayer money). I can guarantee that the fun per dollar spent was much higher today. That's my thought for this morning: that we don't need to be told how to have fun by big corporations. We are better off spending next to nothing creating our own low-priced entertainment.

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Public transportation slows me down

I had neck surgery two weeks ago and I'll be wearing a cervical collar for another four weeks. My cervical collar restricts my neck movements quite a bit. Many people are surprised that it is nonetheless legal for me to drive a car even while my neck motion is so restricted. It's not legal to drive while wearing a cervical collar in every state, although in Missouri and many other states, it is legal. Not that I'm comfortable driving a car without the ability to rotate my neck freely. I've only done it twice during the past two weeks, and it was on low-traffic roads during off-peak driving periods. For the most part, I now get around by exploiting a public transportation monthly pass. Using public transportation has slowed me down quite a bit, but I'm enjoying it immensely. I'm learning the routes much better than I ever did before, and I'm seeing that it's possible to get a lot done without a car, even in St. Louis, because we have a fair number of bus routes in the city, along with several light rail lines. What I've repeatedly noticed is that you can't just get anywhere you want. Now can you get where you want when you want to. You need to check the schedule and work with the system. Sometimes, the buses are not exactly on time. If you're not careful, you'll just miss a bus and then you'll need to wait another 20 minutes for the next one. If you don't think ahead, you'll get rained on because you forgot to bring your umbrella. Sometimes, the places you want to go are not exactly on the bus route, and you might have to walk a mile after getting off the bus. If you have something that you need to bring along, you can't put it in the trunk because there is no trunk. You either carry it with you or you don't bring it at all. I find that I'm really becoming much more empathetic about other folks who must use public transportation. Yesterday, I because really frustrated when I saw a woman barely miss the bus. What if you need to take your kids somewhere and you don't have a car? Well, you use public transportation. Last week I saw a woman with five young children pile them all onto the bus. They were all quiet and well-behaved as their mother carefully put six bus fares in the fare box. There's also quite a few characters on public buses. Today, I sat next to a man who was selling pirated DVDs to fellow passengers. One woman told him that she didn't need a DVD, so he told her that he sold cosmetics too. His entire inventory of DVDs and cosmetics was in a paper bag that he carried along with him. It's inspiring to see how often people in public buses help each other out, helping each other with the doors or with each other's bags, or calling out to the bus driver if someone needs a little extra help. There's other kinds of characters too. Some of them don't smell so good. Others talk to themselves rapidly. Some of them are extremely friendly and willing to give lots of encouragement to a stranger with a neck brace. Others sit quietly and still others look notably confused. Many people strike up animated and entertaining conversations with fellow passengers, oftentimes with people they don't know. Many of the passengers are overweight, and it's tempting to see how they will fit themselves into the smallish seats between two equally large passengers. Taking a bus is much different than driving a car. When you take a bus, you don't have to worry about your car. You don't have to worry about maintaining it or parking it or keeping it from being stolen. You don't have to worry about getting distracted and running over a young child in a crosswalk. What I most notice about taking the bus, however, is that the rhythm of life changes. I can't have what I want exactly what I want it anymore. I can't just get downtown in 12 minutes on a whim. Rather, it will take 10 minutes to get to the bus stop, another 20 or 30 minutes to catch a bus up to the light rail stop, and another 10 or 15 minutes to get downtown on the light rail. It really does take about four times as long for me to travel one way to my place of employment (that's about twice as long as it takes to ride a bike there-- I've been told that a bill to ride a bike again in about a month or two). Some might think that it would be extremely frustrating to not get where you want when you want to get there, but I'm finding that these moments are golden opportunities to think about important things and not important things, and to enjoy being out in the world with a lot of decent people who don't have fancy cars or fancy houses. There's not a lot of bus passengers trying to impress each other with what they own because on the bus most people don't own much. You can see it for the way they dress and you can see it from how they talk. You won't hear people bragging about taking a trip to some fancy vacation spot. There's nobody trying to impress anyone else with his BMW. You won't hear people confusing who they are with what they own. It's all so refreshing, relaxing, therapeutic, normal.

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Never pay for textbooks again, in six steps.

A college education (and even more, the "college experience") costs a lot of money. One of the most bemoaned college-related expenses is textbooks. Every quarter or semester, students trudge through their local bookstores and shell out hundreds of dollars for the heavy, price-inflated compendiums of glossy photos, useless asides, and (maybe) small slivers of information. The pattern of behavior is always the same: the students scan the bookstore shelves for cheaper, used editions (perhaps $70 a pop instead of $100). Some classes require multiple books; some classes require ten. The students carry the stack of texts to the counter and pony up hundreds. In class, the books may never be used- it's impossible to tell when they will actually be relevant. Later, these students gather the books up and try to return them to the store for a pittance (maybe $20-30). Often a book is not returnable because it is an "old edition"- a new version has just come out, with minor updates such as a new cover photo and a table with a new layout. Next quarter, everyone will be buying the full-priced new editions. The textbook industry is a racket. The books are made unnecessarily expensive, for they are puffed-up with frilly nonsense. My school drove up the price of Psych 100 textbooks by requesting a special "Buckeye Edition"; the only difference was a black-and-white photocopy inserted into the first page, which acknowledge the student reader as a member of Ohio State. It's a hose. Last year, however, I realized that I never really have to pay for textbooks. For the past four quarters of school, I have not laid a cent on a bookstore's counter. As I see it, there is no reason for any student to ever pay for textbooks, ever again. Here are my simple steps to attain free textbook access:

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Payday lending in a nutshell

I represent consumers in several class actions against payday lenders. The suits are all based in Missouri, but payday lenders freely do business in most states. What are "payday lenders?" Here is a six minute video by the Center for Responsible Lending that will give you a good idea. To best understand what goes on, ignore the industry rhetoric. Instead, recognize that payday loan shops commonly charge more than 400% interest to the working poor, setting people up in debt traps from which the end result is financial ruin. Why not simply ban shops that engage in these practices? Good question. Ask your elected state and federal representatives why the hell they aren't taking serious action. Hint: the problem has a lot to do with campaign contributions. One more thing: the payday loan shops try to exculpate themselves with arbitration clauses that ban all class actions and class arbitrations. These clauses make it extra difficult to successfully sue these businesses, even when they are flagrantly violating the loan laws that do exist. By using these mandatory pre-dispute arbitration clauses, payday lenders are essentially giving themselves Get-Out-of-Jail-Free cards.

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Who I Am Is No One Else’s Business

As this just happened, I thought I'd come right home and write about it. I just had one of those customer service incidents that sends me over the moon. I walked into a store to find something. I was in a frame of mind to buy. I found the something and asked the sales person "How much is that?" Back at her desk, she sat down, I sat down, and I expected her to punch up the price on her computer and tell me. Instead: "What's you name?" "Private individual," I replied, a bit nonplussed. "I need a name for the quote," she said. "You have to have it?" "Yes." "Have a nice day." And I walked out. Now, this was perhaps petty of me. What, after all, is the big deal? She needed to punch a name into her computer to open the dialogue box to ask for the price. Here's the big deal: IT'S NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS WHO I AM UNTIL I DECIDE TO BUY FROM YOU! This is a persistent and infuriating condition in our present society that causes me no end of irritation because so few people think it is a problem that I end up looking like a weirdo because I choose not to hand out private information for free. It has crept up on us. Decades ago, when chain stores began compiling mailing lists by which they could send updates and sale notices to their client base. Then they discovered they could sell those lists to other concerns for marketing. Now we have a plague of telemarketers, junk mail, spam, and cold calls and a new social category with which to look askance at people who would prefer not to play. Like me. In itself, it is an innocent enough thing. But it is offensive, and what offends me the most is my fellow citizens failing to see how it is offensive and how it on a deep level adds to our current crisis. Look: if telemarketing didn't work, no one would do it. A certain percentage of those unwanted calls actually hook somebody into buying something. Direct mail campaigns have an expected positive return rate of two percent. That is considered normal response and constitutes grounds to continue the practice. Economies of scale work that way. So if only two to five percent of the public respond favorably to the intrusions of these uninvited pests, they have reason to persist. I think it might be fair to say that people with money and education don't respond as readily as poorer, less educated folks who are always on the lookout for bargains---and often find bargains they don't understand and probably end up costing them too much, like sub prime mortgages. We are too free with our personal information. Maybe you or you or you find nothing wrong with always giving out your phone number or your zip code or even your name and address when asked, in Pavlovian response to the ringing bell behind the counter, but what has happened is that we have made available a vast pool of data that makes it easy to be imposed upon and that has aided and abetted a consumer culture that has gotten out of hand. And made those of us who choose not to participate in this look like some form of misanthropic libertarian goofballs. How hard is this? If I choose to buy from someone, then I have agreed to have a relationship, however tenuous, with them. Unless I pay cash, they are entitled to know with whom they are dealing. But if I'm not buying, they have no right to know who I am. And I can't know if I'm going to buy if I don't know how much the object in question is. Trying to establish the buying relationship in advance of MY decision to buy is...rude. I have walked out of many stores when confronted with a request for personal information. I've had a few shouting matches with managers over it. In some instances, the unfortunate salesperson is as much a victim, because some software programs these days have as a necessary prerequisite for accessing the system the entry of all this data. The corporation won't even let the employee make the call whether it's worth irritating someone over collecting all this information. Concerns and worries over Big Brother have a certain validity, but it is largely unremarked that the foundation of such a system will not be imposed on us---rather we will hand the powers that be what they ask for because we can't muster up enough sense of ourselves to say, consistently, "None of your damn business!" There. I feel better. I needed to get that out. This rant has been brought to you by Consumer Culture LTD.

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