Cyber Enviro Recruitment

Growing up in Montana, I always considered Paul, the stepfather of my best friend, to be a remarkable person, stoic and intelligent. In the last year or so, I have been following his blog and have found him to be an environmental activist of admirable diligence, wit, and eloquence.

Please view his blog, and consider visiting it often for the chance to engage in important environmental petitions and issues.

Networking really is everything in this world.

Democracy In/Action

We are a nation of laws, and not of men. And yet the Republican campaigning of late has focused on two men, 'Joe The Plumber' and Bill Ayers. These are attempts to campaign on fear, not on the issues, and they undercut that 'maverick' image that they tout so much.

I. Joe The Plumber

The Republicans have turned him into an icon, trying to appeal to the working class, trying to make them worry that Obama would raise taxes on them, ignoring the fact that if Joe The Plumber makes less than $250,000 a year, he has nothing to worry about, and if he makes more than $250,000, then he should be able to afford to pay taxes. I personally would love the opportunity to pay taxes on $250,000.

The question of whether or not Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher is licensed as a plumber is not at issue. If he works as a plumber, he is a plumber. The question of licensing is certainly of concern, but not in this context.

The question of his unpaid back taxes in light of his question is also not really the point. If he's unable to pay his current taxes, then he is not going to be impacted by new taxes. In fact, according to the New York Times, some tax analysts say that if Joe's new plumbing business makes $250,000 gross, not net, he would probably be eligible for tax cuts under Obama's plan.

Here's a site with a summary of the Joe/Obama conversation.

Joe is being used as an icon to sow fear about socialism and sharing the wealth, ignoring the fact that the only people who would have taxes increased are the wealthy 5% who had their taxes cut by the Bush Administration. And a little socialism doesn't seem like such a bad thing after all the unbridled capitalism seen on Wall Street of late, creating hedge funds on hedge funds on funds that aren't there and overwhelming the banks and insurance companies when one institution fails, sending rippling waves of fear down through the entire economic web.

II. Bill Ayers

The campaign, Sarah Palin especially, is using a tenuous connection between Obama and Bill Ayers, who participated in the Weather Underground organization when Obama was eight, to imply that Obama is a T.B.A., Terrorist By Association.

Yes, politicians are going to have the people around them examined. For instance, John McCain has explaining to do about his association with Charles Keating, who stole millions of dollars from California taxpayers in the 80s.

But Ayers is not a close associate of Obama, has no role in Obama's campaign. Obama has condemned the actions of the Weather Underground. Something is neither true nor relevant just because Palin and McCain keep repeating it.

It is disingenuous of the Republicans to claim they are doing anything other than implying Obama is a terrorist, an other, and the only reason they are doing that is to play on fear, and that is not what we need to be talking about.

If you want to compete for the image of being the party of change, give us a good plan that will impact the country positively, and keep the tone of the campaign clean. For the most part, this has been a relatively cordial campaign, but the implications of terrorism are simply unacceptable.

If Christopher Buckley, the son of William F. Buckley and an admirer of John McCain, criticizes McCain's handling of the campaign and endorses Obama for president, leading to his own resignation from the National Review, that is something that McCain needs to consider.

Translations

Saturday was a day of liminal incidents.

In Dolores Park, we saw a street man, dressed neatly in a blue polo shirt, slacks, and a red baseball cap go from polite, sing-song hawker of the Street Sheet to disdainful, wounded-pride accuser of racism after a girl in a lavender hippie dress bluntly dismissed him. I couldn't hear what exactly she said to him, so I don't know if his response was warranted or not, but it was a jarring note, for sure.

We traveled to Berkeley to attend a reading, and in a cafe along Telegraph called the Mediterraneum, we conversed with a couple of gentlemen who have dropped out of society, but who sit outside coffee shops. One of the gentlemen looked remarkably like an El Greco painting, with an elongated face and white beard, and the long fingers of a pianist, all the while wearing an aquamarine and white track suit. From them, I learned:

a) it can be a choice to live in a van, bartering a place to stay for your friends in exchange for use of their computers and phones;

b) it can be enough, perhaps, to have companionship, the occasional chance to lend or borrow money, or the chance to work in a harvest of sorts for the gas money to make a plan for road trips;

c) there is someone in Berkeley named Mouse;

d) there is someone who attends free meals at a church who kicks his fellow lunchers in the posterior;

e) there is a woman who can sleep sitting upright on a bus stop bench, bundled up in jackets and hooded sweatshirts, asking for change.

From the cafe, we made our way to the UC Berkeley campus for a reading/conversation with Haruki Murakami, the prolific, acclaimed, funny and talented author of such works as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka On the Shores, Underground, and After The Quake.

After a few brief comments, such as a lament that he was missing the chance to watch Akinori Iwamura and the Tampa Bay Rays play the Boston Red Sox, Mr. Murakami read one of his short stories in Japanese, after which it was read in English by the professor who would moderate the post-reading conversation. It was read in English, of course, because as Mr. Murakami said, "many of you don't speak Japanese. Which is not MY fault."

The interview/conversation/Q & A session was interesting on many levels. Mr. Murakami's answers were often a bit circuitous, literary, with a lot of substance that I think could be found in what he didn't say, or in what was merely implied. I found that one or two of the interviewer's follow-up questions seemed to have already been answered. I think there was a bit of a language barrier still, even though they were each fluent in the native tongue of the other. A couple of times, it seemed like Mr. Murakami was taking the gist of a question as a launch point for a different topic all together, which as the author would be his right.

I liked what he had to say, on three points in particular:

1) he is patriotic, but he doesn't write for his country, but for his people. This was in regards to his works Underground and After the Quake, which followed two tragedies in 1995, the Kobe earthquake and the serin attack on the Tokyo subway system by members of a cult;

2) he never thought about his potential to write until he was 29;

3) he believes in translations of his work; if the story is good, it will have the same impact in different languages, despite the linguistic differences between translators. This was a good point, as I myself have been sometimes ambivalent about reading translations.

In the final analysis, we are all the same on a fundamental level. He doesn't write his stories about the character of Japanese people only; if that were so, the stories would fail internationally and he would not have been translated into 40 languages. The cause of a homeless life is not necessarily something inherent to the individual that can't be chosen or found by any one of us. Those borders are fluid things. In troubled, stressful times like these, those borders can either be solidified, set in concrete, or can be erased a bit, shifted, expanded.

It will be fascinating to observe which way we choose to proceed.

Why I Work At A Credit Union

The most stressful call in this most stressful of weeks in this most stressful of fortnights in the economic world didn't have to do with members worried about the safety of their money or asking why we aren't insured with the FDIC (we are privately insured with a very selective insurance company that has never had an institution fail, and does not insure institutions with the risky mortgage-backed security investments or the albatross of sub-prime mortgages).

The most stressful call this week was almost surreal. It was almost Hollywoodesque compared to the turmoil in the stock markets, and the general tension and fear that are in the air. A man called from a bad neighborhood in Budapest, Hungary at 1 a.m. An ATM had captured his card, and he was stranded without access to funds, as his friend had lost HIS debit card in Munich. Their trip seemed to have fallen subject to a Murphy's Law of European hedonism.

Let me just repeat that, just for dramatic effect: he was calling from outside a bar in Budapest, Hungary, with no access to funds to get back to his hotel. At one in the morning.

I totally understand why people would be scared about how much insurance is offered for their deposit accounts, and it is a genuine concern; I also know how painful it can be to watch those numbers in your retirement stocks drop and drop and drop. I know why people would want to know what it means to say you are well capitalized with a certain percentage in reserve.

But nevertheless, that just doesn't seem to have the same stress cachet as someone stranded in Budapest, does it?

You see, this member had not called us before taking the trip to notify us that he would be using the card in an unusual place, such as Budapest. When the card security company noticed the card being used in Hungary when it was normally used in San Francisco, California, they kind of took notice, scratched their chins and said, "Hrm."

The member at 1 a.m. in Budapest, Hungary naturally was in no disposition to think along the lines of a fraud monitoring representative in the United States at 1 p.m. He was irate, saying it was all our fault that his card was blocked, that he had been in Japan and Australia and had never had to call us before. He said we had literally put his life in danger.

I'm not going to speculate here as to what he would have said if upon his return from Europe, he were to suddenly have random, extraneous charges pop up all over the former Soviet bloc and we weren't to question them.

To be fair, the ball was dropped. The fraud monitoring group had temporarily restricted his card, and he returned a call to confirm the charges; however, the card was not fully reactivated, nor was he informed to contact us. So when he made a couple attempts to withdraw funds from an ATM in Hungary, presumably after a late nightlife sojourn through the exotic world of Budapest, his card was vacuumed up like plankton being vacuumed through the baleen of a humpback whale.

The member said we needed to get him money, or get him a new card, or else he would shout our defamation from the mountain tops. Apparently he had traveled to Hungary with only one card, only one means of accessing funds, other than his friend, who had also apparently seen fit to take only one source of cash, which he had promptly lost in Munich. I couldn't possibly guess what they might have been doing in Munich to lose a debit card.

All that was kind of besides the point. The point was to fix the problem for the member.

So here's the kind of support and dedication my co-workers display: the manager of our payment systems department volunteered to locate a Western Union agent in Budapest, Hungary (did I mention that location yet?) and walk cash from the credit union to a Western Union agent in San Francisco to make sure the member could get funds by 7 a.m. that morning. He also helped me figure out how we could send a replacement card to the hotel where the member would be staying in Vienna, Austria.

As it turned out, the member was able to retrieve his card from the bank the next morning, and judging by the fact that we were able to get in touch with him to confirm receipt of the wire, he managed to avoid being mugged to death in Budapest.

But still, that was a rather remarkable situation, not one I've dealt with before, and not one I was likely to encounter working for a cell phone carrier, which was my previous job, the first step from an English Literature degree to doing something profitable in the real world.

And that is the sort of culture that makes me feel good about working for a credit union. It is a non-profit, geared to supporting the members; no crazy investments, no cross-selling of unnecessary add-ons and services.

It isn't where I want to be for the rest of my life, working with money. But it is suitable for now, and it has potential rewards beyond those of a monetary nature.