State of Disunion

“The late 1960’s and early 1970’s marked the dramatic erosion in the belief among working-class whites that the condition of the poor, or those who fail to prosper, was the result of a faulty economic system that needed to be challenged.   Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow

As I write this, all eyes in the political world are on President Obama and the annual State of the Union address. It’s the Grammy Awards for the governing elites. The big military brass get to dress up in their crisp uniforms, shoes spit-shined, medals gleaming; the Supreme Court justices arrive in their flowing robes, and all the Cabinet officials are on hand to support their boss. According to the mainstream press, Obama won’t outline any grand strategies this year because he knows Congress will not act on anything he proposes. John Boehner will sit behind Obama, smirking throughout the speech or looking pained, as if suffering from a bad case of intestinal gas. Mitch McConnel will look smug, like an old Southern racist might look when being addressed by a black man.

The Prez will no doubt talk about the dangers of income inequality, trot out stark facts to show just how far ahead of the rest of us the plutocrats are, maybe even conjure the ghost of LBJ, but, rest assured, though he might bemoan the ugly consequences of such inequality, he has no solution for it. Obama knows, only too well, who his masters are. Obama is not Theodore Roosevelt. We can expect soaring rhetoric, as always, and inconsequential tinkering on the safe margins. In other words, more of what Obama has delivered the last five years, which, for working Americans, equals squat.

Though the American horizon is dark and the majority of people running scared, Obama will remind us of the strength of our union, how blessed it is by the hand of God. Keep in mind that we are the exceptional nation, the chosen nation, if you will – if you can still suspend your disbelief and believe in that shit. Never mind the perverse failure of corporate capitalism to provide for the majority; never mind all the phony debates about the size of the federal government; never mind our illegal drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia; never mind the size of our prison population, a stunning majority of which is African-American; never mind the abysmal failure that is the War on Drugs; never mind that working people have no power; never mind that our government spies on us – all the time.  

Is the union strong? No, not as strong as it could be if our political leaders had any vision, morality, honesty, or compassion. Make no mistake, it’s a dark time on this fruited plain; the few honest voices (Bill Moyers, Amy Goodman, William Rivers Pitt, Chris Hedges and Cornel West among them) that point out that we are hurtling toward the abyss are drowned out by the din of corporate cheerleading. It’s all about Wall Street, the number posted on the big board at the closing gong, as if that number – up, down, sideways – means jack shit to wage slaves like you and me. Wages flat, pensions looted or gone, Social Security under attack, working class whites and blacks and Mexicans divided by the same racist machinations that have long pitted them against one another. Divided we get used, abused, and tossed.

You’d think we’d learn.

I avert my eyes from the State of the Union. Better to switch off the light and sit in the dark, with the doors closed and locked, and the blinds drawn.

King’s Nightmare

“We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ’person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., April 1967

Every MLK holiday I wonder what King would think if here were alive today. In his 1967 speech at the Riverside Church in New York he talked about a revolution of values, but, if anything, the revolution has been in the wrong direction. Very few contemporary leaders ever speak about the evils of militarism or materialism, and racism comes up only when another unarmed black kid is gunned down by a white man, or abused by a gang of white police officers, and then the apologists rise as one to plead extenuating circumstances.

What would MLK think about drone strikes against unarmed civilians, targeted assassinations of suspected militants, and state-sanctioned torture? What would MLK – who was more radical than most people remember -- think of President Obama, the first African-American president? If he were forced to grade Obama’s performance in the highest office in the land, what grade would MLK bestow? C-plus? D-minus? Straight F?

In 1967, King said, “America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values.” America is still one of the richest nations on the planet, though we now bear the distinction of also being one of the most unequal; we spend more of our national treasure on armaments and spying than all other nations, combined, and wage wars all over the world, whenever and wherever we want. Our values are twisted and perverse, driven by blind devotion to the profit motive – nearly always at the expense of people and their communities, or the land, water and air we all need to survive. Our elections are rigged. Our courts are corrupt. Our standing in the world is diminished. The only revolution we can lead at this point is one that ends in fascism.

I can’t help but think we are living King’s nightmare rather than his dream. Were his four children toddlers today they may not be judged exclusively by the color of their skin, but they certainly would be judged by the amount of money in their pockets or purses, as well as the social positions held by their friends and associates.

King marched, spoke, agitated, and went to jail on more than one occasion in order to achieve racial justice and equal opportunity – for all -- not only African-Americans. He spoke out strongly against the war in Vietnam and what it cost Americans at home, and abroad; he understood the toll that war takes on a nation, be it the nation upon which war is directed or the nation waging it. MLK would appreciate the futility of waging war against a tactic, year after year with no end in sight or even desired by the power elites. The War on Terror may be futile and stupid, but it’s enormously profitable, so of course it will continue.

At home MLK would see a government fixated on austerity and punishment of its most needy. He would see for-profit prisons making money off the backs of non-violent drug addicts. He would see a generation of students hogtied by crushing student loan debt, and a lack of opportunity for social mobility.

MLK would see this and much more and I imagine his heart would feel heavy. He would wonder, but not for long, because he understood history, how this reversal of fortune came to pass, how the rich and powerful and those who speak the language of racism in coded terms, and those who would turn working Americans into serfs managed to pull it off with so little resistance.

Plunder

“The actual process of exploitation transpired through political and economic means. Controlling parties and governments, the nonproducing classes had licensed business and banking monopolies that favored members of their own classes.”  

      

Harvey Kaye, author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America

The notion that private enterprise can do anything more efficiently than government is accepted as gospel in these United States, where most members of the Republican Party profess hatred of government, and a fair number of Democrats believe much the same thing. In the halls of our government, despising government is an article of faith – right up until the shit hits the fan. That’s when the for-profit crowd tosses in the towel and hides under cover of PR flackery. A chemical spill in West Virginia contaminates drinking water, impacting hundreds of thousands of people. No harm, no foul. The spill may never have happened if the chemical industry, a close crony of Big Coal, hadn’t paid lobbyists to buy off politicians to write laws and cast votes gutting regulatory agencies, and allowing these companies to police themselves. Big mistake.

How about Target, the retail giant, and all those credit and debit cards compromised to hackers because Target took the cheap and easy approach to network security?

How about our domestic airlines? Hardly a day passes without a story about a mid-air near miss, or a 737 jet sliding off a runway.

How about the cable TV monopoly, owned and operated by a mere handful of companies – Time Warner, Comcast, Cox – courtesy of a captive FCC, bought and paid for by corporate money? Shit service for premium prices. Good for the corporate bottom line, bad for powerless consumers. Watch what happens to your cable bill now that an appeals court has struck down Net Neutrality. The fat cats at Verizon are licking their chops with anticipation.

Not satisfied with ruling almost everything, the corporate motherfuckers and their political allies demand more privatization, more unaccountable monopolies, more “regulatory” relief; otherwise they can’t unleash creativity and innovation. It’s a load of BS that has been forced on the public, drummed into our heads year after year: the profit motive is the only pure motive. We’ve been force fed Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand fantasies of freedom and democracy through free market capitalism.

Privatize the CIA, the armed forces, the DEA, the prisons, the schools, and the national parks. Slap a price tag on every aspect of human existence.

Every time I hear some self-satisfied asswipe compare public schools to for-profit businesses I want to puke in the nearest gutter. Schools are not mirrors of your local Wal-Mart.  Public education is a sacred trust, not a discount emporium that makes profits by squeezing suppliers and paying workers slave wages.  If participatory democracy is to have any meaning and relevance, informed citizens are needed. One of the reasons Americans fought a war for independence from King George is because our forebears believed that ordinary citizens had the capacity to govern themselves. No monarch, dictator, czar or pope need apply.  

Too much power, whether political or financial, in too few hands is a tried and true recipe for tyranny. The phenomenon recurs in our history: 1825, the Gilded Age, 2014.  Craven and corrupt politicians desperate for campaign money sold the governed – that’s us -- down the proverbial river (probably polluted). In this pathetic and cowardly era, Democrats act like Republicans and happily vote to make the poor even poorer. The idea of an active government, counterweight against corporate power, has been discredited. But when our corporate masters fuck things up, taxpayers are expected to cover the bill. Wealth is stripped from the dying middle class and handed to profitable corporations in the form of direct or indirect subsidies, tax breaks, and loopholes in the tax code big enough for a blind first year lawyer to drive an armored truck through.

Our brand of perverse capitalism legalizes plunder. Our modern day robber barons hide behind lofty concepts like free enterprise and free markets and competition, but what they love more than anything is a captive market and a comfortable monopoly. No band of pirates ever had it so good.

The Turning of the Screw

“The freedom to shop has become the major obligation of citizenship.” Henry Giroux

Well, here we are, the year 2014. The turning of the calendar, the turning of the screw. I’ve been thinking about the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, as it’s more commonly known, and the many promises made by then president Clinton about the glorious new economic order that NAFTA would usher in. More jobs for Americans. Solid labor and environmental protections. More trade and a larger market for American goods. Almost none of this came to fruition, and in fact the exact opposite happened. US manufacturing jobs vanished, wages for US workers flat lined, our trade deficit ballooned, and the environment has taken a pummeling at the hands of resource extractors. NAFTA disrupted Mexico’s agricultural economy, decimating family and indigenous farmers, and driving thousands of people into cities in order to find work, only to discover that the number of people in search of work exceeded the number of jobs available. For many Mexicans there was no choice but to head north, across the border. Now the financial titans and their lobbyists and lackeys are cooking up another trade agreement, a much larger one this go round, called the Trans Pacific Partnership. If you’ve never heard of this beast, don’t feel bad – it has largely been negotiated in secret, with large swaths of it given little exposure to the congressional representatives who are supposed to protect our interests. Mr. Obama, that staunch defender of the ruling elite, is pressuring Congress to abrogate its responsibility for negotiating trade treaties and give him “fast track” authority to make the TPP a reality. Heaven help us if this comes to pass.  

A few days ago my wife and I were out running errands, driving here and there to buy some “stuff” we need to live, and when we got home with all the booty, I realized that we had purchased food items at three different stores: Costco, Trader Joe’s and the Fresh Market. The latter is a new store for us, recently opened on Milpas Street where the Scolari’s grocery store had operated for years. The Fresh Market (owned by Associated Food Stores, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah) opened to some fanfare after a major renovation of the building: new façade, wrought-iron railings, an upscale appearance for the white folks who dwell up on the hill. Inside, there are new lighting fixtures and soothing classical music to put shoppers in the right frame of mind – or perhaps to calm them while they fondle $7 blocks of Italian cheese or $18 bottles of chardonnay. Most of the fruit, I noticed, is from outside the US – tomatoes from Mexico and grapes from Chile. Many kinds of imported pasta, an olive bar, dozens of specialty coffee blends, micro-brewed beer -- everything the well to do need to throw a chic party on the Riviera or behind the walls of a Montecito villa. I don’t see the largely Latino population who live all around the Fresh Market shopping at the store, any more than I see them making the trek uptown to Whole Foods, where the contents of one bag might run $50.

And that was the point of my ruminations, the great good fortune my wife and I and our children enjoy, even though, by the lofty standards of the Platinum Coast, we are paupers. To be honest, I felt a little stab of guilt; my shopping aids and abets a system that kills people and destroys the planet on which we all depend. The great capitalist machine, a perverse monstrosity, produces glaring extremes of wealth and poverty, and makes it feasible to import grapes from Chile at less cost than grapes grown in California.

Exploit or be exploited, win or lose, thrive or perish. The screw turns and the hard edge of the world becomes ever harder.