SZCZBlog

Four days in Boston of parties, media reform activism, networking, and baby chasing amidst the 5th National Conference for Media Reform left us tired and hungry on the afternoon of Sunday, April 10th, still with a day to spare before we would leave town.

The problem was, we were at the Boston waterfront, which is renowned for its affinity for fish (I suspect being so close to the ocean may have something to do with that), and I, having been vegan since September 1993, didn’t expect to find anything (or much of anything) to eat. Worse, the nearest non-hotel restaurant we could find within ready walking distance was a sports bar, which made me even more leery of finding anything to eat, never mind anything worth writing a blog post about.

Suffice it to say, I was very happy to be proved wrong. The restaurant we found and ate at, Jerry Remy’s at the Boston Seaport, had the best veggie burger in my entire life. For one, the sandwich was big, stunningly so (I like big portions). The menu (online in PDF and in Scribd!) boasts it as “house-made organic”, and it comprised a delectable combination of grains, vegetables, and legumes — even full cloves of garlic. Score! And it being a sports bar on a Sunday afternoon, they had lots of sports to watch; I was pleased to see games involving the Tigers and Red Wings on TV at the time. Score!

I asked to speak with the manager, a gentleman with the last name Mitchell (grin), and informed him that I would write up a post of praise on my blog. Mr. Mitchell kindly told me a little bit of the behind-the-scenes regarding the restaurant, which accounts for why the burger was so good.

When in Boston, visit Jerry Remy’s Seaport (not to be confused by Jerry Remy’s across from Fenway Park).

This is Six:

Six a humanoid Cylon played by Canadian actress Tricia Helfer in the remade Battlestar Galactica series.

And this is also Six:

Six is also a board game where players take different-colored hexagons to make either a six-sided ring or a triangle made from hexagons or a line of six hexagons in a row — and try to prevent their opponent from doing the same.

So last Christmas, I got for my cousin Stefanie (who I knew was a fan of the remade Battlestar Galactica) a copy of the board game Six, but wrapped like this:

Clever, eh? (The gift, and the way it was wrapped, was a big hit.)

For a time, I played competitive Scrabble. I even won a couple of tournaments. I don’t play very much these days, what with a new baby and being busy changing the world and all.

But as a lark, I decided to try something: ranking Scrabble players’ last names by using Scrabble’s own scoring system. I figured my last name, with three Z’s (30 points), two C’s (6 points), and a K (5 points), would make me very competitive.

So I downloaded the full list of Scrabble players from the North American Scrabble Players Association. Then I ran a couple of Unix commands and wrote a quick Python script to find the answer.

Here’s are the Unix commands and the full source code of the script (don’t blink):

cat current_2011-01.txt | awk '{print $1}' > current_2011-01-2.txt
time ./scrabble_last_names.py > current_2011-01-3.txt
more current_2011-01-3.txt | sort | uniq | sort -nr | head -30

rows = open('current_2011-01-2.txt').readlines()
for row in rows:
sum = 0
row = row[:-1]
for letter in row:
sum = sum + letter_values[letter]
print sum, row


And the results of the top 30 last names, with their respective Scrabble scores, are listed below. I was right to think I was competitive.

52 SZCZEPANCZYK
48 PRZYBYSZEWSKI
43 MROCZKIEWICZ
42 MIKOLAJCZYK
41 ZXQKJ
41 KAZMIEROWICZ
38 JANOTA-BZOWSKI
37 ZMORZYNSKI
37 VAZQUEZ
36 KRAWCZYNSKI
35 SZYMKOWIAK
34 MARTINEZ-WOMBOLD
34 KLEMASZEWSKI
34 IMPELLIZZERI
34 GAJDEROWICZ
34 EZEKOWITZ
34 CZERNIKOWSKI
34 CRAWFORD-MACKAY
33 SCHECKWITZ
32 SUJJAYAKORN
32 SCHWARTZBERG
32 NAHACZEWSKI
32 MATLOCK-WASHINGTON
32 JANKOWITZ
32 GRZYBOWSKI
32 GIOVINAZZO
31 ZEBOVITZ
31 ROHATYNSKYJ
31 QUACKENBUSH
31 MACQUEEN-SMITH


Some thoughts:

• Polish names dominate. By my assessment, the top four, eight of the top ten, and 15 of the top 30 scores are Polish — what with a preponderance of Z’s, that’s little surpriZe.
• Having a hyphenated last name also helps; of the top 30, four have hyphenated last names; the leading hyphenated last name (JANOTA-BZOWSKI) has both hyphenated parts being Polish.
• I won; good thing I studied hard. Cue Queen.

Corporations, as we’ve seen previously, have been the focus of repeated scorn and criticism, justifiably so since they can be deemed responsible for a great many ills in the world. Being able to hold them accountable for their actions, often real crimes, has been easier said than done — often, not done at all. I promised in my last post to offer a strategy to attack corporations at once — rather than one by one.

I’ve discussed it before, but here it is again, put briefly: Attack markets. To describe it again with more words, it is to replace the economic institution of markets with another, better, economic allocation institution. How exactly that’s to be done and what to replace them with are bigger questions which I’ll tackle reserve for future posts. But in this post, I’ll elaborate on the reasons why markets should be targeted and replaced.

While corporations are widely reviled as evil, markets are perhaps just as widely (and ironically) regarded as good. They supposedly serve as neutral and reasoned arbiters, where buyers and sellers can vote through their dollars in a mechanism deemed far more efficient than any kind of command-planning economy (like corporations, but I’m getting ahead of myself here). It is certainly part and parcel with the functioning of the major media in the United States. Even in left and progressive activist circles posit variations of markets under such rubrics as solidarity economics or market anarchism. And non-profits and liberal activists — including many I’ve worked with on various media-themed efforts — tout competition as a positive value.

So, markets are good, corporations are bad. And yet, markets a big reason why corporations exist and thrive. The two, I would contend, are intimately connected. To explain:

1. Markets are a competitive realm.
2. Competitive realms are ones in which participants either win or lose — there’s seldom no middle ground, and survival is the name of the game.
3. In a competitive realm, you’re at an advantage to be or behave like a monster to improve your chances to win, since being nice is antithetical to survival.
4. Corporations are the political economic equivalent of monsters, as the book/movie The Corporation has discussed.

The result: Corporations are the “selected for” entities since their monster-like behavior best ensures their chances for survival.

One expected consequence (among many) from this relationship between markets and corporations is that, over time, competition reduces the number of competitors through attrition or buyout or both. (Any season in any sport is attrition; 30 teams play in the NHL, but only one teams hoists the Stanley Cup in June.) It’s rational in a market to become a monster or become part of a monster.

Another expected consequence is that corporations are internally dictatorial. If you’re constantly behaving like a jerk in outside relations, what makes you think it’s rational to be nice on the inside?

This answers the question hinted at by the title of this blog post: If corporations are subject to such scorn, and corporations are direct spawn of markets, why aren’t markets held to such similar scorn? Because, I would suggest, the same corporations that survive and thrive from markets are also the same corporations that command the lion share of media and widespread awareness of issues.

That’s my proposed strategy: Take on corporations by taking on markets. What are some possible tactics for something far easier said than done? That’s a matter I’ll start to tackle in future blog posts.

I had jokingly written on the Chicago Media Action website that corporations were responsible for 95.8% of all ills in the world. That’s obviously grandiose to quantify the ills to such a precise percentage, but it’s unquestioned that the modern-day limited liability corporation is the cause for a great many ills in the world, and that a great deal of forward-thinking progressive activism amounts to fighting one or another corporation, or many corporations at once. Some examples off the top of my head:

Labor: Corporations are interested in maximizing their own profits at the expense of everything else, including their own employees. So unions and grassroots groups fight hard just to maintain or modestly raise their own wages while under long and harsh working conditions. The example of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers comes readily to mind: an organization of poor migrant workers in Florida working to help tomato pickers who labor from early morning until late at night six days a week by raising the wage of a penny per pound of tomatoes picked, and launching grassroots publicity campaigns against the biggest food retailers on Earth (e.g., Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Burger King, Chipotle). Other corporations like Walmart have bitterly fought to prevent their own workers from organizing unions or joining already-organized unions, and examples of that are abundant.

War: Corporate military contractors like General Electric, Raytheon, TRW, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin make money — a LOT of it — by selling overpriced military equipment to the U.S. government, and increasingly in other governments, to power the perpetual war machine. It’s now to the point where private contractors in war-related efforts — including mercenary armies like DynCorp, Triple Canopy, and the company formerly known as Blackwater — now outnumber government war efforts and personnel themselves.

Politics: Corporate lobbying on various efforts in the United States in a massive endeavor, growing every year, and now in the realm of billions of dollars annually, and in the wake of the Citizens United ruling in the U.S. Supreme Court could well grow more massive. Additional realms of corporate influence in the political process can take the form of public relations campaigns, campaign contributions to politicians, politicians returning to higher-powered political positions after a stint in the private sector (the proverbial “revolving door”) , and claiming high-paying executive jobs in the corporate realm after leaving government service (the proverbial “water slide”). A great deal of that money raised from corporations is used to buy advertising time on broadcast media outlets, and the most powerful and best-well-known media outlets (certainly in the United States, and increasingly worldwide) are also corporations.

Media: Most of American media is the province of a small number of corporations, and the set-up of that was done behind closed doors by corporate lawyers with little public involvement or awareness. The media often prevent or dampen awareness of a great deal of social justice campaigns, which is why activism on media and media policy issues has been growing in recent years. My work on media policy activism has for the most part focused on efforts against one or another corporation, including the Tribune Company, Comcast, and AT&T.

Environment: I gave a presentation at an environmentali conference in St. Louis which began with a rundown of corporate efforts against the environment. To quote from my presentation: “Corporations — particularly those transnational corporations with limited liability and rights of personhood — pose a great threat, perhaps the greatest threat, to the environment and to the future of this planet. Examples are legion: Exxon-Mobil and global warming, Georgia-Pacific and rampant clear-cutting, Shell Oil and oil extraction, General Electric and the nuclear industry, and (relevant to St. Louis) Monsanto and GMOs.” You could now add British Petroleum and the Gulf Oil Volcano to the list.

Banking: New York Times columnist Frank Rich made an interesting comparison which I’ll use as a segue: “[British Petroleum]’s recklessness is just the latest variation on a story we know by heart. The company’s heedless disregard of risk and lack of safeguards at Deepwater Horizon are all too reminiscent of the failures at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and A.I.G., where the richly rewarded top executives often didn’t even understand the toxic financial products that would pollute and nearly topple the nation’s economy. BP’s reliance on bought-off politicians and lax, industry-captured regulators at the M.M.S. mirrors Wall Street’s cozy relationship with its indulgent overseers at the S.E.C., Federal Reserve and New York Fed — not to mention Massey Energy’s dependence on somnolent supervision from the Mine Safety and Health Administration.”

The case can easily be made that corporations are the cause, or at least a major contributing cause, to these and a boatload of other problems. So, it’s easy to argue that corporations are a big problem. But if corporations are a problem, what’s the solution? Some suggest “holding them accountable” or “enforcing anti-corporate regulations“. Others advocate criminal prosecution, enacting the corporate equivalent of the death penalty by revoking the charter of corporate criminals.

But a term like “corporate criminals” is redundant: every corporation will put its own short-term profits above the law, thus making corporations effectively criminal by definition. I suppose you could revoke all of those corporate charters one by one, but that’d take a heck of a long time. Best take steps to attack all corporations at once, draining the shark tank as it were.

What might be a strategy for doing that? That’s the topic of my next blog post.

By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was not part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it. — Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

It’s arguably the most delectable idea in all of economics — the notion that markets, particularly free markets, harness the drive for private wants into the establishment for public needs. How would this happen? Robin Hahnel, in his excellent book “The ABCs of Political Economy: A Modern Approach” summarizes thusly:

Suppose consumers’ taste for apples increases and their taste for oranges decreases — for whatever reason. Assuming consumers know best what they like, how would we want the economy to respond to this new situation? If there were an omniscient, beneficent God in charge of the economy she [Ed note: Yeah! Go, gender equity!] would shift some of our scarce productive resources — land labor, fertilizer, etc. — out of orange production and into apple production. What would a system of free markets do? These changes in consumer tastes would shift the market demand curve for apples out to the right indicating that consumers now would demand more apples at each and every price of apples than before, and the market demand curve for oranges back to the left indicating that consumers would now demand fewer oranges at each and every price than before — leading to excess demand for apples and excess supply of oranges at their old equilibrium prices. The micro law of supply and demand would drive the price of apples up until the excess demand would drive the price of apples up until the excess demand for apples was eliminated and the prices of oranges down until the excess supply of oranges was eliminated. At the new higher price of apples, the law of supply tells us that former apple growers, and any new ones drawn into the industry by the higher price of apples, would increase production of apples by purchasing more land, labor, fertilizer, etc. At the new lower price of oranges the law of supply tells us that oranges growers would decrease their production of oranges by using less land, labor, and fertilizer, etc. to grow oranges. Bingo! As if guided by an invisible hand, without anyone thinking or planning at all, the free market does what a beneficent God would have done for us!

This idea of the invisible hand sound tempting ideologically. But this is tempered by its nightmare cousin within markets — what economists E.K. Hunt and Ralph D’Arge in 1971 called the “invisible foot”. It’s predicated on the idea that markets exchanges ignore certain dimensions of the exchange, lumped into the catchall category “externalities“. The archetypal example is purchasing a car. If I buy a car from a local car dealership, I get a BRAND NEW CAR and the car dealer gets a bunch of my money. But there are effects of my purchase that extend beyond, sometimes well beyond, the immediate transaction between buyer and seller, and thus ignored by markets. It’s easy to rattle off a list of some of the bad effects, or negative externalities:

* Increased air pollution
* Increased noise pollution
* Increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, hastening the climate crisis and all the negative results thereof.
* Increased wars, since our oil got under the sand of distant countries who have this crazy idea that our oil belongs to them, so we have to persuade them.
* If I crash my car into a bus full of schoolchildren, killing most of them and hospitalizing or traumatizing the rest, that’d be some serious negative consequences, perhaps for the lifetimes of those schoolchildren and those families.

But there are also some positive externalities to my car purchase. For example:

* I can give rides to political activist friends of mine, thus saving valuable time that would otherwise be potentially wasted by using slower, public transit.
* I can enter into a wider number of social circles by using my car as a conversation piece, and thus introduce them to ideas they wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

Whether or not good externalities outweigh bad externalities, these externalities represent costs which one may argue should be reflected in the transaction cost between the buyer and seller, but don’t by definition. Perhaps if these externalities were insignificant, as Adam Smith and many economists since have assumed, one might make the case that externalities can safely be ignored. But as my first off-the-cuff list demonstrates, externalities can be very significant, and very negative. (Remember those schoolkids.)

Which brings us back to the idea of the “invisible foot” — namely, the idea that negative externalities outweigh the positive externalities and the immediate benefits. But it’s worse than that. To quote from one of the economists who coined the term, E.K. Hunt:

If we assume the maximizing economic man of bourgeois economics, and if we assume the government establishes property rights and markets for these rights whenever an external diseconomy [ed: a negative externality] is discovered [the preferred "solution" of the conservative and increasingly dominant trend within the field of public finance], then each man will soon discover that through contrivance he can impose external diseconomies on other men, knowing that the bargaining within the new market that will be established will surely make him better off. [Ed. note: It's ironic that this otherwise very progressive passage still smells of recidivist sexism. That said, I doubt that any sane woman would want to claim dibs on what's to follow in this passage.] The more significant the social cost imposed upon his neighbor, the greater will be his reward in the bargaining process. It follows from the orthodox assumption of maximizing man that each man will create a maximum of social costs which he can impose on others. D’Arge and I have labeled this process “the invisible foot” of the laissez faire … market place. The “invisible foot” ensures us that in a free-market … economy each person pursuing only his own good will automatically, and most efficiently, do his part in maximizing the general public misery. “

There’s another quote of E.K. Hunt’s that’s worth sharing here, on the question of whether or not externalities are pervasive:

When reference is made to externalities, one usually takes as a typical example an upwind factory that emits large quantities of sulfur oxides and particulate matter inducing rising probabilities of emphysema, lung cancer, and other respiratory diseases to residents downwind, or a strip-mining operation that leaves an irreparable aesthetic scar on the countryside. The fact is, however, that most of the millions of acts of production and consumption in which we daily engage involve externalities. In a market economy any action of one individual or enterprise…constitutes an externality. Since the vast majority of productive and consumptive acts are social, i.e., to some degree they involve more than one person, it follows that they will involve externalities. Our table manners in a restaurant, the general appearance of our house, our yard or our person, our personal hygiene, the route we pick for a joy ride, the time of day we mow our lawn, or nearly any one of the thousands of ordinary daily acts, all affect, to some degree, the pleasures or happiness of others. The fact is…externalities are totally pervasive. Only the most extreme bourgeois individualism could have resulted in an economic theory that assumed otherwise

In other words, in market competition, you’re looking to maximize profits and minimize costs, and those competitors will thus look to pass off costs where possible to the public and other parties. Those costs, even though they’re ignored by those in the immediate transaction, are widespread and carry significant negative effects all the same (sometimes very significant). With the scale of technologies and global cataclysms that may await humanity on the horizons (melting icecaps, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, increased nuclear waste, chemical toxins, rising rates of garbage, et cetera, et cetera), those externalities can be more significant still.

On the question of which is larger — the number and amount of negative externalities versus the number of positive externalities in an economy — the only way to arrive at a definitive empirical answer is to find all the externalities, assess them as positive or negative, figure out their costs and add them up. Problem: markets provide no way to gauge that answer. The model of participatory economics, however, does — through its use of “indicative prices” which gauge as closely as possible the full spectrum of costs for consumption and production (which I would divide into four components — labor, environmental, social, supply-and-demand). But in a market, because externalities are pervasive, and negative externalities are passed off and positive externalities (when they occur) are kept, the invisible foot ends up bigger than the invisible hand. A lot bigger.

You can add the weekend of Saturday and Sunday, March 6th and 7th, 2010, to the list of most memorable weekends of my life. My kochanie Bree, who was nine months pregnant but not officially due until March 17th, informed me on the morning of March 6th that her water had broken. Now, it appeared that the baby would be coming far earlier than expected — so we scrambled to get as much done on March 6th before we’d have to go to the hospital. Problem was, we had a full day and evening of events scheduled for that weekend — including a charity trivia tournament in Deerfield, Illinois. After discussing the situation and our options, we decided that I would go to Deerfield, and call in regularly for updates.

I’m no stranger to the event — I participated in it twice before. The Annual JA Trivia Night takes place every year at the corporate headquarters Baxter International around March as a fundraiser for Junior Achievement. The event is massive — upwards of 50 teams, some 600 participants, attend the event. In 2010, the event was emceed by Dave Legler, who still holds the title as the biggest money winner in NBC’s history, having won $1.765 million on the non-corrupt version of Twenty-One. (Disclosure: I’ve known Dave for years, since we are and have been members of the Game Show Congress, and have been a teammate of his both at the Deerfield event and at Game Show Congress events.)

I’m no stranger to success at the Annual JA Trivia Night either. The past two times I attended, I was on teams that took second place — including one team which held first place for every round of the event except at the end of the tournament. But I didn’t finish at first place in the tournament. Not yet anyway.

Dave had assembled a bunch of free agents — friends that he knew — into a team in Deerfield that got assigned the name “Team 54″. (You can cue the “Car 54, Where Are You?” jokes; we cracked jokes on this theme all night in Deerfield.) Teams are allowed up to eight participants on a single team; we only had six participants. There are 10 rounds of questions with 10 questions in each round; each question was worth 10 points, totaling 1000 points total. My team was flirting with first place for much of the night; our main rivals at Team 52 traded first place with us for much of the night. But we had the lead going into the last round. Could we hold off? Could we capture first place at the end? Answer: Yes. We got 9 of the questions in the last round, and finished (going away, it turns out) for first place. Team 52 had a poor final round and actually finished in third place. So, yay team! Our reward: $50 Discover gift cards, a basket of cookies, and a very nice trophy.

But during the event, I called Bree to give her updates of our progress, and to get updates from her. Contractions had now begun; it wouldn’t be long now. I had taken the Metra train to Deerfield, but luckily two of my teammates on Team 54 lived just four blocks from where I lived, and graciously gave me a ride back. Once I got home it was a scramble to cancel everything planned for the rest of the weekend and the next couple of weeks (including a Scrabble tournament in Wrigleyville scheduled for March 7th). I used the same notebook I had to track Team 54′s round-by-round score in Deerfield to start keeping track of the distance between contractions. (The old stopwatch I used for this purpose apparently couldn’t handle all the strain and it, or at least its battery, died the next day.)

At 1AM we made the decision to go to the hospital. By 2AM we had arrived at the hospital. And at 6:47AM, after pulling an all-nighter (just the first of many subsequent all- nighters), my son Zachary was born. Getting a big trivia win and having a brand new baby boy. A successful weekend.

Changing the topic a bit. Because of the time commitment and responsibility of having a new baby, I’ve decided to concentrate my efforts on one avenue of political activism that I think needs my attention (and needs more attention from a great many others), and make all my other political-activism related activities (my weekly radio show, my contributions to Chicago Independent Television, my Chicago Media Action work) I do an appendage of that — focusing on spelling out more explicitly the connections between corporations and markets and strengthening the case for the abolition of the latter, crazy though that may sound. I’ve written and presented on this before, but predominantly in presentations that were fairly restricted in time (my presentations on this topic were only ten minutes long each). Obviously, I’ll need more time and more room to elaborate, and making this blog the planned venue for being a sounding-board, development platform, and distribution mechanism of same. The plan is: make a blog post once a week with this focus in mind, and redistribute through my various media commitments (radio, television, other internet sites) of the case about corporations, markets, and economics.

Next week: The Invisible Hand versus The Invisible Foot