BlackNotBlack.com

Politics Redux

When I posted about Barack Obama a few weeks ago, friends seemed surprised that I wasn’t on the bandwagon. No disrespect to Barack, but my candidate was John Edwards. Why did I like Edwards? Well, he was vocally anti-corporate. Why is that important? Because excess corporate power is the problem from which all other problems flow. Iraq would never have been attacked if it hadn’t been a profitable scenario for corporations. Jobs wouldn’t be offshored if it weren’t profitable for corporations. The U.S. news media would broadcast actual objective news if it weren’t so profitable to instead to sell God, prejudice, and patriotism. Obama and Clinton are battling for the nomination of a supposedly progressive party, but neither of them seems interested in fighting corporate power. In fact they are each, in their own way, in the pockets of corporations. And corporations are at war against the American people. Don’t take it from me—let’s have a corporate shill tell you in his own words:

The threat to our culture comes from within. In the 1960s, there were welfare programs that created a culture of poverty in our country. Now, some people think we won that battle when we reformed welfare. But the liberals haven't given up. At every turn, they tried to substitute government largess for individual responsibility. They fight to strip work requirements from welfare, to put more people on Medicaid, and remove more and more people from having to pay any income tax whatsoever. Dependency is death to initiative, risk-taking and opportunity. Dependency is culture killing. It's a drug. We've got to fight it like the poison it is.

This was Mitt Romney speaking on February 7th, as he shut down his campaign. I chose his statements because they outline conservative doctrine quite explicitly. You’ll get some version of what Romney said from pretty much any Republican you speak to. He suggests that largesse without responsibility is wrong, yet his party had no problem bailing out corrupt investment bankers to the tune of one trillion dollars. He thinks people who have minimal income should be obligated to pay income tax, while Republicans have reduced taxes on the rich over the past thirty years to an extent that has cost the United States trillions in operating capital. And he slams Medicaid, which is by far the most popular government program ever created. To make all this nonsense palatable to his hateful followers, he wraps everything in an attack on the poor, even making the insane claim that there was less poverty in the United States until welfare came along. It's all standard Republican speechmaking, a misdirection play designed to encourage people to punish those they hate, yet simultaneously gloss over the fact that the party's pro-corporate policies actually hurt all individuals.

Romney again: If you depress the private sector you depress the well-being of all Americans. That's exactly what happens with high taxes, over-regulation, tort windfalls, mandates, and overfed, overspending government. Did you happen to see, by the way, that today government workers make more money than people who work in the private sector? Can you imagine what happens to an economy where the best opportunities are for bureaucrats? It is high time to lower taxes, including corporate taxes, to take a weed whacker... Get out—get out that weed whacker and take it to regulations and reform entitlements and, by the way, stand up to the increasingly voracious appetite of the unions in our government (at this point Romney gets a round of applause, and it’s the apocalyptic sound of hypnotized thousands cheering a multi-millionaire who is begging for financial help).

So here we have corporations, through one of their shills, openly declaring that they would like to pay fewer taxes. Romney can spout this effluvium without being stoned to death because few Americans, not even his starstruck supporters, understand that more than sixty percent of US-controlled companies pay no taxes. That's right—zero. More than seventy-percent of foreign-owned corporations operating in the U.S. pay no taxes either. But this isn’t good enough for big business. Somehow, they’re still unduly burdened. Let’s revisit Romney for a moment: If you depress the private sector you depress the well-being of all Americans. I’ll just point out here that corporations that avoided taxes between 1996 and 2000 earned 3.5 trillion dollars in profit. It begs the question of how forgoing a nominal 35% taxation of 3.5 trillion dollars helps Americans. And along the same lines, why are there three trillion dollars available to fight a war, one trillion available to bail out Wall Street, but no money—according to George W. Bush—available for Social Security (which is a program an overwhelming majority of Americans support)?

Mitt Romney’s words are illustrative of corporate greed, but the fact that they are tolerated without cries for his public tarring and feathering are a symptom that Americans have surrendered. There was once a social pact that stated that if you took a job, worked it productively, and did not break the law, you would be rewarded with a stable existence and a peaceful retirement. You would be able to buy a house and raise a family. This promise was the impetus that drove the white middle class toward productivity (there were no promises made to blacks). Today, the entire middle class—white and black—are finding that they have been cast adrift. Everyone has heard about offshoring of manufacturing jobs. But how many people know that the Miami Herald newspaper recently outsourced a percentage of its copy-editing and design work to India? Sounds impossible, doesn’t it, but it’s true. Why pay expensive American professionals when Indian workers will do the same job for a fifth the wage? Just as a virus eventually destroys its host, so American corporations are in the processing of destroying America. No one listened when factory workers lost their jobs, but what about when professionals begin to feel their carefully built foundations crumbling? Are you an html architect? A graphic designer? That’s nice. I hope you’re also good at tending bar, because in another few years you’ll be mixing mai-tais eight p.m. to closing six days a week.

When a nation rescinds its most basic promises, can that nation thrive? The answer is no, and clearly, the United States ceased thriving a while ago. You hear quite a bit of propaganda extolling the rising GDP, but neither GDP nor the Stock Market possesses any real relationship to prosperity. It’s sort of like when you hear that a motion picture is number one at the box office. What has box office receipts to do with whether a movie is good? Nothing, of course. The same is true of GDP and the NYSE. Even as the corporate media conflate GDP with general prosperity, people’s pensions disappear, social security is attacked, and health insurance coverage vanishes for millions. The middle class and poor must constantly defend the few table scraps they possess from the rapacious rich, who already have enough resources to last ten lifetimes yet are still angry that a few gnawed chicken bones remain out of their reach. These sick monsters are like Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood: “I cannot abide another man’s success.” Well, no need to abide it, because it doesn’t exist anymore. The American working class was once the most prosperous on Earth, but in a mere thirty years it has been politically disempowered, divested of its wealth, and left behind. Corporations were able to effectively abolish workers’ rights by taking control of every federal agency in Washington, including the Department of Labor. They were able to disembowel the regulations that made the country’s managed capitalism successful for the working class. All of these policies were conceived and enacted by players on the right side of the political spectrum, and went unopposed by those on the left. Because of this collusion everyone is now suffering—both inner city blacks and suburban whites. Under the circumstances, you'd think it was time to stop fighting each other and start fighting the real enemy—people who refuse to believe in limits to what they should possess.

By any objective measure, the United States is a nation in steep decline. It’s been in decline since 1973, when the bottom 90% of wage earners reported an average income in adjusted dollars of $33,000 for the year. Since then that number has fallen sharply. Let's reiterate: Wages for 90% of the population have been falling since 1973. Yet approximately half of that 90% continue to support policies that hurt them. The United States now trails most of Western Europe in life expectancy, health care, child care, and has higher poverty rates and infant mortality. Those in the conservative orbit deny these facts. Rudolph Giuliani comes to mind—he claimed that England’s prostate cancer survival rate was half that of the United States, and much of the millionaire press corps, led by Fox News, defended this bald-faced lie. Those few on the right who admit that, okay yes, the numbers tell the true sad story that Americans live shorter, sicker, more stressful, poorer lives than most Western Europeans, lay the blame on blacks and illegal immigrants for dragging down the metrics of healthy and productive white folk. But Europe has massive immigration patterns as well. And those who immigrate to Europe do so from the most crushingly poor regions of the world, such as Pakistan and West Africa. Yet this influx of desperate millions has not decimated European health standards. U.S. health problems stem from deficiencies in care, not people. Each year, according to the Institute of Medicine, 100,000 people lose their lives in hospitals due to medical negligence. 18,000 more die each year because they cannot afford health care. Some studies place these figures much higher, so high in fact that in many circles medical negligence is considered to be the number one cause of death among Americans.

In nearly every way imaginable Western Europe is a better place to live. Standard features of life include paid maternity leaves of up to six months and paid vacations of up to six weeks. European cities possess functional public infrastructures and full-service urban cores that reduce or eliminate the need to spend money on cars and gasoline, except by choice. Western Europe has low crime and incarceration rates, whereas in the U.S. one out of every one hundred adults is in jail or prison. Western Europe has miniscule rates of homelessness; in the U.S. half a million people or more live on the streets. There is more social mobility in France, Germany, and Scandinavia, than in the United States. The European Union attracts more foreign students than the U.S., and studies indicate this is not just because of the quality of education, but also because its consensus-driven polity is the societal model to which the developing world aspires. Western Europe is living proof that mixed-economy welfare states can be prosperous.

But in the United States the orthodoxy is that profits must always be at their greatest, whatever the cost to human beings. If a corporation makes a million dollars in a year but could make a million point two dollars by jettisoning on-site day care for its employees, it is obligated to do so, though this hurts the community. Not only is this an immoral philosophy, but the religion of growth-at-any-cost sells out humanity’s future. This is obvious to anyone who simply scans a WHO report. In order to feed the seven billion mouths that exist on this planet today, we need twice as much food and twice as much potable water as currently exists. By 2050, we will need three times as much. Water and food are not going to appear from outer space, so that means we’re already in serious trouble. The scarcity of resources forces nations to horde and fight for those that are available. Iraq needed to be destroyed not only to steal the oil for the United States, but also to keep it from China and India. More growth means more war. More war means more likelihood of nuclear war. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out.

Rather than continue to live the nightmare of war we can share resources, which would require collective sacrifice. This is the inevitable path for humanity if it is to save itself from destruction. Jeremiah Wright said 9/11 was “chickens coming home to roost” and was vilified for it. To deny that U.S. meddling in the Middle East set it on a course toward 9/11 is to deny that the Earth is round (or, better yet, to deny that killing nineteen of every twenty original inhabitants of North America was a genocide). Take careful note of those who are offended by Wright’s comments. The offended are people who have never read a history book, and would prefer that you didn’t either. I’ll accept people saying that Wright’s statements were difficult to hear because they were angry and accusatory. That I can buy—hey, even blackhearted conservative demagogues have feelings (though not for anyone else). But anyone who claims 9/11 occurred out of the blue, and had no relationship to U.S. policy in the Mid-East, is a liar or a mental case. Simply paying a fair price for oil from the very beginning would have been a good step toward preventing this tragedy, but the U.S. preferred to game the system. They preferred to replace Iran’s elected leadership with a dictator in 1953. It was kind of fun actually, like a spy novel. They fucked over naive Arabs while swilling martinis and noshing canapés. But somehow the Arabs grew sophisticated enough to drive tanks and enrich uranium. Hey! Hey now. Stop kidding around, Mahmoud. Play time is over buddy. You aren’t really mad at me are you? Mad at your Uncle Sam? After all I’ve done for you?

Believe it or not, it is possible to make an across-the-board social decision to not maximize profit. Stateside, the mere suggestion of forgoing growth and profit would get you laughed out of any policy discussion, but in Europe they’ve not only suggested it—they’ve accomplished it. They have assembled a social safety net, which is by definition a drag on growth, but in return have less crime, less imprisonment, and a greater social accountability than in the U.S., created by providing the working class a system they feel invested in preserving. Whereas in the U.S. one can only earn state assistance by humiliating oneself, in Europe assistance is considered a human right. Curbing desperation, resentment, and alienation in society is understood to be beneficial. It doesn't matter that you may not like the people you're helping—the positive effects are real, and outweigh your urge to be vindictive. It’s called socialism and it works. Europeans did not arrive at this choice by magic. Centuries of devastating warfare had a little something to do with their decision. They realized that warring for resources benefits only those who manufacture war machines. Sharing of resources does not prevent all upheaval, but if the alternative is to live like Americans, where the rich victimize the poor then retreat into gated communities patrolled by private shoot-to-kill police forces, then the Europeans have made their preferences clear.

There is quite a bit at stake in the upcoming election, and for the reasons explained above, I cannot support a pro-corporate candidate. Obama is an appealing character, but he isn’t campaigning to challenge the status quo. Quite the opposite—an Obama election would shore up American capitalism, make it easier to sell to suspicious third-world people who happen to be his approximate skin tone. And since securing a low-wage third-world work force even at the expense of U.S. prosperity is a major goal of business, Obama is a guy they wouldn’t mind having as the face of this initiative for four years. No matter which of the remaining major candidates is elected, the American decline gets steeper unless corporations are corralled and restrained. When will that happen? Well, let's just say that my pessimism on the subject is convincing enough to have spurred others to abandon the U.S. as I did in 2002. My friend Steve starts life in the Netherlands in July, and Charlie is now eyeing Spain. As for me, I become an expatriate again after Diana finishes her grad degree this summer. Perhaps leaving—and twice at that—is defeatist, but it keeps my tax money from greedy millionaires, which makes it a protest too. Leaving is also personally enriching, since life outside the States is quite beautiful for black Americans. That beautiful life is what this blog has mostly been about, and from now on I'll stick to that subject, and leave electoral politics behind (really this time).

Labels: barack obama, iran, mitt romney

posted by Egan Ehlers @ 11:10 AM 2 comments

On the Road with Evil Gods, Part 2

Charlie, John, Lea, and myself were driving northeast through Honduras toward the port town of La Ceiba. Accompanying us were the gods Chac and Maximon, and two coatimundi in a cardboard box. Our non-sentient cargo included five deck chairs and many cases of Guinness. We had Port Royal beer and were loaded to our eyeballs. Once we reached La Ceiba we would catch a boat to the Caribbean island of Roatan. The trip had already taken a few unexpected turns, and now the gods, both of whom were believed to have influence over the weather, seemed to be stirring up trouble in the clouds. We let the coatis out of their box and they proceeded to crawl inside our shirts looking for either a comfortable place to sleep or a nipple to suck. My nipples gave no milk, never have sadly. I can't speak for Lea. We fed the coatis some sliced bananas and that seemed to satisfy them. By now Charlie had named them Stan and Ollie, or something to that effect, but I called them Zuko and Blixa and so they shall remain for the duration of this tale.

We stopped in a town called El Lano, or maybe Santa Rita, to have a new front assembly put on the truck. Hours later the dealer finally told us the Nissan mechanic was out until morning. We had squandered our chance of making La Ceiba before dark, which meant we had to find a hotel. The place we selected was hosting an art opening, and after checking in we milled with local well-to-do types in our sweat-stained clothes and discussed the merits of pieces that were, in truth, uniformly awful. I was quite nervous to look so road worn in such nice surroundings, because the last two nice hotels I’d visited with Charlie had kicked us out. It was his fault both times. Though being escorted off private property by men carrying shotguns is kind of funny in a way, and it makes a good story, I just wasn’t in the mood for the trifecta. So I retreated to my room and stayed there until morning.

The next day the mechanic replaced the Nissan’s entire front assembly right there in the hotel parking lot, and we were on our way by 10 a.m. We drove John to a small airport from which he planned to charter a flight to Roatan, and the rest of the trip to the coast was uneventful, which meant we were well rested for the ordeal to come. We dropped the Nissan at the car ferry, which you see pictured just above. This is a different ferry than the human ferry. The two facilities are about a mile apart. We thought we’d be able to catch a cab between them, but no such luck. There were plenty of cabs headed the right direction, but they were all carrying humans already. We had no choice but to walk a mile in the heat, toting all our luggage and valuables, and of course Zuko and Blixa in their box.

We reached the ferry building drenched in sweat, and bought tickets as the same bad skies from yesterday returned. We knew it was illegal to carry animals from the mainland to Roatán, because islands have delicate ecosystems and it’s dangerous to introduce new creatures to such habitats. This is an especially serious issue when you consider the case of the Galapagos Islands, which thirty years ago had no inhabitants, but today has 30,000 full-time residents and is overrun with cats, dogs and goats destroying Darwin’s pristine landscape. But on the other hand, horses are not native to America but look what their introduction did. Western movies would be totally different without horses. Cowboys would ride what—ladies in hoop skirts? So mixing species and habitats is a good thing. Unfortunately coatis make high-pitched squeaking noises—if you’ve ever watched Star Trek, they sound exactly like tribbles—so it wasn’t long before the customs folks noticed them.

At this point we had to resort to bribery. Bribery is a common transaction throughout the world, though most people don’t have the guts to try it. But it really works. For example, a bribe had freed me from paying customs duties on my G4 desktop in Mexico. Bribes had spared Charlie from trouble in Guatemala and Honduras. And just so that I don’t unfairly single out Latin America, I should mention that when I worked at Playboy, some employees kept porn movies in their cars because L.A. cops gladly accepted them in exchange for not handing out a ticket. Anyway, Charlie discreetly paid off two customs officials and they let us take the animals on the ferry (in truth it was more complicated than this, and involved a ruse to fool the customs supervisors and so forth, but the details don't really matter unless you want to bribe customs officials yourself, in which case, request info via comment).

The ferries that run from La Ceiba to the Bay Islands are pretty big. The photo above—which I borrowed from a website since I never thought to take a photo of the ferry—shows a vessel similar to the one we rode, except about thirty percent smaller. Another important difference is that we did not have good weather. No, Chac and Maximon had really been busy and the sky was gray and blustery. Charlie asked me if I was prone to seasickness. I told him no. He said there was a vending machine somewhere that sold motion sickness pills, and that I should buy some if I wasn’t sure. “I’m sure, dude. Why?” He nodded at the water. It was foot high chop, at the most—not even remotely worrisome. “That? That’s nothing.”

“Just wait till we get out of the bay.”

“I’ll be fine,” I told him. Instead of dismissing Charlie, I should have reminded myself that he does not fret all that much. He was in the Army, where you learn not to waste time and energy stressing. Army command keeps charts of battlefield survivability for various positions. Charlie saw his survivability stats once. For what he did in the Army, survivability in combat is considered to be less than five minutes. So Charlie isn’t a guy who worries much. But I could tell he was worried about this crossing. I ignored him though, because what I said was true—I don't get seasick.

The Roatán ferry carries more than two hundred people, and since we were near the end of the boarding line the only seats available for us were on the top deck, behind the captain’s cabin. I was charged with carrying Zuko and Blixa, and they were really squeaking up a storm now. We took our seats, a horn sounded, hawsers lifted, and we were off. I realized Charlie was right to be worried about the crossing the moment we cleared the breakwater. The sea simply reached up and grabbed us. Reasonably smooth sailing abruptly became a cold windy carnival ride. One of those carnival rides that is designed to make you scream, but with the distinct difference that those rides go three minutes whereas this would last more than two hours. Our places were as far from the surface of the water as could be yet we were soon drenched. The spray was climbing two stories and battering us in our seats. I was lucky I'd worn a rain jacket.

Charlie screamed, “Isn’t this fun?” Or maybe he screamed, “Isn’t this fucked?” It was hard to hear.

It got more fucked. As the water deepened the waves grew higher and more violent. Pretty soon we were porpoising, that is, diving up and down on the waves. The captain's cabin was ringed by large windows, like the cabin pictured in the previous ferry shot, but larger. From where I sat I could see through the cabin. When the ferry crested a wave all I could see was the point of the bow aimed downward toward the ocean. Then we would hit with a boom and a curtain of water would break over the top of the boat. I was getting the worst of the spray where I was sitting. Finally I could take no more. When the ferry began to climb the next swell, I surged from my seat, sprinted astern, crashed down on the wooden deck and wedged myself behind a brace of lifeboats. These boats were stacked about six feet high, so I figured if I sheltered behind them I would at least be safe from the freezing spray.

I was wrong, of course. Sea winds do crazy things on a ship's deck. If anything I was getting it worse, but I wasn't going to risk moving again. It was possible for people to get around—with difficulty—as long as they kept a deathgrip on the deck rail. But I had to hang onto Zuko and Blixa. I'd risked flying overboard already. I wasn't about to do it twice. By this time the box was soaked and they were clawing through the soggy cardboard. I squeezed my hand inside and stroked the little guys’ heads, but they weren’t having any of it—they wanted out. If they got out, they’d go overboard with the next wave. This was a bad situation.

By the time we were half an hour into the trip ten to fifteen people on the top deck had vomited. Some managed to drag themselves down the stairs to the main cabin bathrooms, but a few had simply heaved over the rail. Charlie looked intact, but Lea was turning the grey-green of a frog’s belly. The rough ride continued and people continued to barf, one by one. There were about seventy people on the upper deck and I’d estimate fifty of them lost their lunch, some more than once. By now the coati's box had pretty much fallen apart. I quickly shucked my rain jacket, wrapped it around what was left of the box and held on tight. I thought I was drenched before, but without the rain jacket I learned the true meaning of the concept. I got soaked to my underwear. My dreadlocks were so saturated they took until the next night to dry completely. Lea wobbled toward the stairs and disappeared, on her way to barf in the cabin. Someone’s hat flew past and sailed overboard.

Charlie came staggering my way and sat beside me. “Is it any better over here?”

“I seriously doubt it.”

At least we were close to the lifeboats if the worst happened.

To conclude this sad tale, we survived the crossing and straggled into Roatán's port town of Coxen Hole by 7 p.m. More than a hundred people had vomited. Lea had hurled twice. Charlie barely survived. "Five more minutes of that," he said, "and I would have barfed too." And me? I was fine. As I said, I don't get seasick. But that doesn't mean I can't get nauseated by other things. Walking through the enclosed lower deck to disembark the stench of vomit almost smothered me. I would have lost it if I hadn't rudely pushed my way to fresh air.

So that is the story of how Charlie and I were supposed to smuggle Guinness from Copán to Antigua, but instead ended up smuggling two coatimundi to Roatán. There are two epilogues. First, the Guinness, which did not belong to us and thus went unopened the entire trip, was simply too enticing to resist any longer. We drank it all, every can, over the next week of partying. Our friend Jan, who was the impetus for the road trip in the first place, didn't get a single drop. Second, in an effort to be a good parent Charlie took the coatis to a local vet to see if they perhaps needed shots. The vet gave them shots, and the shots killed them both. So this post is dedicated to poor Zuko and Blixa. If there's a coati heaven, they certainly earned passage by putting up with the likes of me and Charlie.

posted by Egan Ehlers @ 2:41 PM 1 comments