Black Detroit, White Wall Street

I listened to President Obama talk about the Trayvon Martin trial. As usual, Obama said all the right things, sounded the right notes, but at the end of the day it’s unlikely that his administration can or will do a thing to change the dynamics that put Trayvon Martin in the ground long before his time.

Obama said we must give young African-American men options, pathways to opportunities to improve themselves. Ironically, a few days before the president’s speech, the city of Detroit declared bankruptcy. Detroit is the poster child for urban deindustrialization, job flight, corruption, poverty, mismanagement, and crime, and the face of contemporary Detroit is black.

How many Trayvon Martin’s are trying to survive in Detroit?

The Detroit that lives in the American imagination perished a long time ago, destroyed by monetary, tax, and trade policies pushed by every administration from Reagan to Obama. Obama has continued the new American tradition of slavish fealty to finance at the expense of working people.

For African-American men to have opportunities, they must first have a shot at decent jobs at living wages -- the sort of jobs that existed in the old Detroit – otherwise they will never set foot on a path that leads out and up.

Flipping hamburgers and dunking French fries in grease for minimum wage won’t do the trick, and it’s ridiculous to expect large numbers of African-American men to become entrepreneurs, though some certainly could, given a helping hand. Obama said not a single word about manufacturing jobs or union wages, though it is manufacturing jobs that are needed, and not only in the African-American community.

We honor finance, the buying, selling and trading of pieces of paper with the same fervor that we dishonor our inner cities. If there is an urban policy in place in the Obama administration I have no idea what it is. Perhaps, like almost everything else, we’ve left urban policy to the whims of the invisible hand of the market god.  

Working people have felt the back of that hand for three decades, but for African-American men it has been more like blows from the back of a fist. Detroit is but the most glaring example of the downward spiral: jobs flee, companies close, non-whites decamp to the suburbs, the tax base erodes, infrastructure decays and public services decline; the big money boys swoop in like vultures over carrion, and turn whatever public assets are left into commodities. 

I don’t think this country cares much for people like Trayvon Martin. Fear the Trayvon’s? Yes. Stop and frisk the Trayvon’s? Yes.  Criminalize the Trayvon’s and lock them away at rate disproportionate to the rest of the population? Yes.

But if we cared about people like Trayvon Martin, the president and the Congress would be doing for black Detroit what they did for white Wall Street. 

GULAG

One can only imagine the backchannel maneuvering going on in Washington D.C. and the corridors of the NSA and FBI and CIA and State Department over Edward Snowden. It must be frantic, a race against time to determine what information Snowden has beyond what he has already disclosed.

“I want to know everything this motherfucker Snowden has ever done in his miserable life! I want to know how many times he has jerked off! I want to know what kind of porn he looks at! I want to know about his mother, his father, his siblings and his fucking cat. I want information, and I want it now.”

Yeah, I imagine it’s hyper damage control mode driven by intense pressure from the White House. I imagine daily progress briefings held in secure conference rooms. Diplomatic conference calls with Russia full of pleas that Snowden be turned over to the US, and veiled threats of serious consequences if Russia refuses to comply. Quid pro quo deals are proposed.

Any nation that may be thinking of granting Snowden political asylum is put on notice; go ahead, Ecuador, but you’ll never see another nickel of US economic and military aid. No trade favors for you, Bolivia.

Comply with Uncle Sam or be crushed by our naked power.

The world’s foremost bully uses all its juice to isolate Edward Snowden, choke off his escape routes and reduce his options to zero.

The bully is unnerved by the young man living temporarily in the transit lounge of a Moscow airport, afraid of the data on his laptops and thumb drives, what he may have stored in the cloud or transmitted to others. Countless operatives are working around the clock on the Snowden affair, staring at computer screens until their vision turns fuzzy. Meanwhile, the bully uses all his power to discredit Snowden in the media, to call into question his motives, to claim that Snowden is a delusional narcissist bent on damaging the vital interests of the US.

One vital interest is that the US, and only the US, has the ability to eavesdrop with impunity on its citizens, allies and enemies. What we would not tolerate from others (except Israel, of course) we demand as our divine right. 

From every available pulpit the bully claims that Snowden was involved in espionage against his own country, land of the incarcerated and home of the Big Mac.

For his part, Edward Snowden has good reason to fear being extradited to the US; the example of another whistleblower, Bradley Manning, must never be far from his thoughts. Manning has been in the military wing of the American gulag for several years, facing multiple charges for leaking information to WikiLeaks. Manning acted out of conscience, too, and his one-way ticket to life in a cage got punched. If the US gets its bloody hands on Snowden, he’ll spend months or years in solitary confinement.  

Along with spectacle, incarceration is now an American specialty.

Easy Money

I feel the pain in my forehead again, the result of reading too much news and listening to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now. Did the abysmal US Congress – that pathetic body of whores – actually allow federal student loan rates to double to 6.8%?

Big banks borrow money from the government at 0.75%.

6.8% for students, 0.75% for banks.

If this travesty is not emblematic of everything wrong with the United States of America in 2013, I don’t know what is.

Do you need any more evidence that this nation is ruled by the finance industry? We may as well anoint Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase King of America and jam a fork in our democracy, once and for all. Fuck this corporate takeover of every facet of American life by dibs and dabs, just kill us quick and get it over with.

The pain is growing more intense, as if the jaws of a vice are closing; my eardrums feel as if they will burst.

Even Democrats have the austerity virus and tell us the nation simply can’t afford to help our students. We can, however, afford fighter jets and Hellfire missiles and drones and cruise missiles; we can afford to piss away billions of dollars chasing evil terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; we can afford to transform the US-Mexican border into one of the most militarized in the entire world, rivaling that of North and South Korea; we can afford to give resource extractors like Exxon-Mobil millions of dollars in subsidies…

And the list goes on and the pain in my head worsens, and the greedy motherfuckers who rule this nation don’t even go through the motions of pretending they give a rat’s ass about the great unwashed masses. They know they have nothing to fear from Americans – this isn’t Egypt or Brazil or Tunisia, places where people get pissed off and flood the streets to demand redress of their grievances. Americans watch TV and stuff their faces with potato chips, and go right on believing in the red, white and blue, go right on electing pinheads, pederasts, and pissants to public office, where they rape us over and over. 

Maybe we deserve to be turned into paupers or serfs, since, after all, we vote for the gangsters who rob us blind, take what was public and make it private, for profit, for those who can pay; nothing is sacred, everything can be reduced to a commodity, valued in the marketplace, traded, bought, sold: education, health care, drinking water, crude oil, soybeans, corn, houses, manufacturing jobs, condoms, cow shit, horse shit and pig shit.

Remember how free trade and free markets were going to set us all free, make us rich? Remember Ronnie Reagan when he intoned that government was the problem? You still believe that bullshit?

0.75% for banks, 6.8% for students.

Nothing but easy money for the rich and this searing pain in the center of my working class forehead.