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