Million $ Road

“Certain habits of mind -- distinguishing between arguments and opinions, admitting self-doubt, rethinking assumptions -- are imperative for collective life.” Andrew Delbanco, The Nation

According to a report issued by Zillow, there are 500 cities in America where the average cost of a home is one million dollars. Astronomical housing prices have been a fact of life in my hometown of Santa Barbara for as long as I can remember, including the day back in the early 2000’s when I wrote my local legislator to oppose a housing development on what had been a small urban farm; at that time, the homes were projected to start at $500,000. That was only the beginning. Inventory is scarce as ever and rents are punishing for working folks. We gave up on the dream of home ownership a long time ago. 

My favorite place to walk is Garcia Road, which starts right across the street from our bungalow, and winds up and up to the Riviera. Garcia is a quiet street with limited traffic, lined by multi-million dollar houses, many of which have spectacular views of downtown and the harbor, and on clear days, the islands in the Santa Barbara Channel. On a recent walk on a day filled with warm sunshine, I felt the sun on my back and heard birds chirping in the trees. I considered all the good fortune I’ve experienced in my six decades of life -- five of which have been lived here -- and felt, not gratitude as much as astonishment. For every person like me, basically content, healthy, how many are like the African woman I read about in The Nation who made a 6,500 trek from her home country of Cameroon to Brazil, through Central America and Mexico, and finally the United States. After coming to the attention of the security forces back home she was arrested and repeatedly raped. She could not stay in Cameroon, her only option was to leave, to go into the unknown. I try to imagine what it must feel like to be forced to undertake such a desperate journey. And that was just one woman’s story, one that happened to gain the attention of a journalist. What about the thousands of forced migrants whose stories will never be known? In the years ahead, as climate change and political unrest make life untenable in more and more places, the world will see more migrants, refugees, and displaced human beings. As far as I can tell, we have no plan to deal with this eventuality. 

I don’t know if unregulated capitalism kills compassion, I suspect it does, though perhaps not at the individual level, because I often see small acts of compassion; it’s at the collective level where scores of human beings are deemed disposable or unworthy. After everything I’ve experienced, studied, read and lived through I shouldn’t be surprised that my country is more willing to build armaments and prisons than schools and hospitals. It shouldn’t surprise me that providing even basic medical care for its citizens is simply a bridge too far or that the American government can break Afghanistan and then blame the Afghan people for their demise. Dig to the root of all of it and you find money. America coddles its wealthy and punishes its poor and still has the audacity to refer to itself as a Christian nation. 

It’s too much sometimes and I feel an overwhelming sadness and sense of powerlessness. Should I just close my eyes and ears and live my comfortable life, convince myself that I deserve my comfort? Should I not notice the homeless person sleeping in the alley behind the motel on State Street, on a night when the temperature dipped into the low 40’s? Should I ignore the lost and broken souls I see around town? 

Some fifty years ago we made the Market our true God and Profit our King. Ever since we’ve busied ourselves slapping a price sticker on almost every aspect of our lives. Unregulated capitalism is cruel, and in the wrong hands wicked. 

Working Stiffs

“What if we treated racism in the way we treat cancer?” Ibram X. Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist

Labor Day is my favorite national holiday. There’s something right and good about honoring the people who do the work that turn the wheels that make the country function. I’ve always enjoyed work. I remember when I was a kid of nine or ten, doing yard work without being asked, just because it felt good to pull weeds or trim a hedge or turn soil with a shovel. Around the same time I was working on the driving range at Muni, our local public golf course which wasn’t far from our house on Ardilla Drive, picking up range balls. Usually it was me, my brother Mike, and another boy named Jimmy Ley, working sections of the sloping range, picking up balls with a small basket fixed to the end of a golf club shaft as the summer sun went down. Some days we finished in the twilight. We carried large yellow wire baskets until they became too heavy, and then we dumped the balls into a bin on the back of a golf cart. I always tried to pick up as many balls in a single pass as I could. I still remember how the basket banged painfully against my hip and thigh. I also remember how satisfying it felt when the entire range was picked clean, and all the red and blue-striped range balls were washed and stacked, ready for the next day.

That was a long time ago now, another life. 

The decline of organized labor and the rise of income inequality have walked hand in hand. If you’re a capitalist, the first thing you want to do is keep labor costs as low as possible, and it’s much harder to do when workers bargain collectively, speak with a unified voice, and always have the potential to shut down production if you try to take too much and share too little. Eliminate the union and the hand of the capitalist is much freer. And if you can get the legislative arm of the government to help you marginalize organized labor, and the judicial branch to deem it perfectly legal, well, the conditions are ripe for maximizing profit -- or increasing shareholder value -- as it’s euphemistically called in this neoliberal era. It’s profit, pure and simple. 

American capitalists have always fought like cornered wolverines to keep workers from forming unions. Slave labor was the optimum system of course, and as Ibram X. Kendi has noted, “It is impossible to know racism without understanding its intersection with capitalism.” When slavery ended, other means to keep workers in line were used, strikebreakers, private detectives, mercenaries, and state and federal troops. Pitting workers against each other worked well, too, white and black, northern and southern, native born and foreigners. It’s a bloody history, largely forgotten in this time of the “gig” economy, the “sharing” economy, the “flexible” economy. Call it what you will but the end is the same: squeezing the maximum production from the lowest possible labor cost. Why do you think American manufacturers moved to Mexico, Vietnam, Pakistan, and China? 

Organized labor has shrunk so much and been on the slide so long that workers are consigned to the kids’ table, ignored by Republicans and Democrats alike. Want to know the state of Labor in America? Look at the federal minimum wage, the bitter fight for $15 an hour, the JANUS decision; look at public school teachers marching for liveable wages. Look at the bloated salaries of university presidents and the scraps thrown to adjunct faculty and graduate student teaching assistants. 

Capitalism runs on exploitation of people and resources. Capitalists will concede nothing to workers unless and until workers force them to by cutting off their sources of capital. You want to understand America? Look at how we treat our elderly, our young, our infirm, our incarcerated, and our workers. Think about how we treat those among us who have the least. Do we lift them up, or push them down? 

Happy Labor Day. 

The Real American Divide

“Now it seems exhaustingly obvious that what’s happening to refugees, to the climate and the biosphere, to the poor under hypercapitalism, is a vicious disregard for their rights and humanity, and that some of the men perpetrating public brutality are monstrous in private is a given.” Rebecca Solnit

The Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges has warned for years about the corporate takeover of the American state, but because Hedges is, for all intents and purposes, banned from mainstream media outlets, his warnings go largely unheard. 

I bring Chris Hedges up because South Dakota recently passed two laws to make protesting the construction of oil pipelines a crime. Eight other states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois are considering similar measures. Think about this for a moment: energy extraction companies -- keen to avoid another Standing Rock -- flush with lawyers, lobbyists and cash, use the power of the state to make public dissent a criminal act. By passing such laws, under euphemistic titles like The Infrastructure Protection Act, the state prioritizes corporate interests over public welfare. This is, or should be, astonishing, but I would wager that most Americans are completely oblivious to such affronts to democracy, let alone the environment on which we all depend. 

Robert Reich recently wrote that the divide in America isn’t between the left and the right, it’s between the oligarchs and the rest of us. He’s correct. The oligarchs, the ruling class, the elites, call them what you want, have been on a 40-year roll, a grand neoliberal economic project of low taxes, privatization of public services, monopolies, scant regulation, and endless military conflicts. They have gutted America’s manufacturing base, decimated organized labor, made it legal to buy politicians (see the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling), and organized an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the many to the few. 

Grotesque income inequality leads to political inequality and political inequality makes it nearly impossible for citizens to exercise agency when it comes to protecting the environment, voting rights, reproductive rights, or stopping the Pentagon from sucking up almost half of all federal government revenue. Neoliberalism has been a spectacular success for the few, and an unmitigated disaster for the many. This is blatantly obvious, but look how both political parties cling to the tenets of neoliberalism. Only Bernie Sanders, and to some extent, Elizabeth Warren, come close to offering a critique of this system that is inexorably destroying our environment and what remains of representative democracy. But none of the bumper crop of Democratic presidential candidates dare to name the real villain: unregulated capitalism. 

And that’s the other factor about the oligarchs -- they set the boundaries of debate, what can be discussed, and what topics, like catastrophic climate disruption, will be studiously ignored. Capitalism itself is never questioned, it’s the only system on offer, the sole possibility, even if it ultimately renders this planet uninhabitable. 

It seems to me that neoliberalism has also stunted our collective imagination. The mass media (owned by a handful of corporations), the universities, the think tanks, all reinforce the dominant narrative of free markets, fossil fuels, imperialism (in the name of freedom and democracy, naturally), and the dangerous idea that the unbridled accumulation of wealth and power leads to virtue. It never has and never will. 

National Emergency: The Long Death of America's Soul

“The even larger problem is that a chronic complacency has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing real to anyone -- except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman.” Thomas Frank, Rendezvous With Oblivion

For me, living in America right now is like watching a train wreck in super slow-motion. The daily insanity coming out of Trump and the Republican Party, the outright cruelty, racism, stupidity, intolerance, corruption, and incompetence is real, and yet, unreal. It hasn’t directly impacted me yet, or the city I live in; Santa Barbara is still gilded, full of well-to-do, smug hipsters, wine bars, craft breweries and gourmet noodle shops, upscale boutiques, and yoga studios. Like they do elsewhere, the rich live well here. The City debates the scourge of electric scooters and the fate of the Paseo Nuevo shopping mall. The latter is a big deal because the Paseo anchors the State Street retail core and a large space once occupied by Macy’s has been vacant for nearly two years. The City and the Paseo’s operators have struck a deal, a lease extension in exchange for $20 million in renovations and upgrades and some dough for services for the homeless -- presumably to keep them away from the Paseo during business hours. The renovations are said to include fire pits and a bocce ball court. When I read this I burst out laughing at the absurdity, but this is the Age of Amazon, 1-click satisfaction, and retailers must resort to all manner of gimmicks to lure people into actual stores; not only do they have to sell products, they must provide the customer an “experience.” No wonder this country is so fouled up. Mindless and endless consumption is our true religion.  

The Orange Menace, unable to garner support by legitimate means for his vanity wall, has declared a National Emergency and will pursue his personal Moby Dick without the consent of Congress or the citizens, who overwhelmingly oppose this monument to racism, xenophobia and fear. The only emergency on the Southern Border exists in what remains of Trump’s fevered brain. His insipid declaration will wind up in the courts, but Trump will no doubt claim a great victory anyway. That’s how he operates, always characterizing his failures as big wins. His gullible followers cheer and wave their red MAGA hats. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, a man as debased and detestable as Trump, backs the president’s play though he probably understands that the courts will throw a spanner in the works -- which will allow Mitch to shake his head and say, what can you do about the courts?

God, how working people in this country have been had, played, manipulated, lied to and betrayed. We let the neoliberals destroy unions, ship jobs overseas, create powerful monopolies, and privatize the commons upon which we all depend. We are overworked, underpaid, spied upon; our votes are almost meaningless, if we are able to vote at all. America is an oligarchy, owned and operated by the rich for the rich. How many of the people who represent us in Congress are multi-millionaires? You think they care about working-class people? They never have. Not Bill-I-Feel-Your-Pain-Clinton or Barack-Hope & Change-Obama. Not Nancy Pelosi. Definitely not Chuck Schumer. With a few rare exceptions, the American working class has given the game away without a fight. We lost our sense of solidarity, allowed ourselves to be torn apart and divided, pitted against one another by neoliberal promises of great jobs manipulating data, boundless opportunity for entrepreneurship. In the meantime, damn near everything we need -- medical care, education, child and senior care, clean water and air, basic services in our cities and towns -- have been privatized by the relentless force of capitalism. The rich and corporations declared a tax holiday for themselves many years ago and barely pay any now compared to what they ponied up in the 1950’s and 60’s. The result? Massive income and wealth inequality, with just a handful of people owning as much wealth as the other half of the entire nation. This is a massive, legal but immoral shift of wealth to people who need it least. Read Martin Luther King, Jr., he knew, he saw it coming and he called the rich out. Then he was killed.

The oligarchs have hijacked our language. Profit, loss, cost-benefit, branding, leverage, synergy, curating, thought-leading, though-partnering bullshit that has spread like a virus. Public agencies now talk like corporations. It’s despicable.

We are down to one functioning political party -- and the Democrats function at a low level of effectiveness because their leadership is corrupted by money -- a bad spot for a so-called democracy to be in. The GOP is now a criminal gang, forcing their minority views on the majority of citizens, giving the government away to special interests, lobbyists, and the Pentagon, which devours about 57% of our total federal spending, an obscene, unjustifiable amount that benefits resource extractors and defense contractors and all the other parasites who suck at the War Machine’s teat. Our wars go on and on and the citizens could care less because too few of us pay attention and none of us are being drafted. The Trump junta is right now doing everything it can to gin up a war against Iran, a nation that isn’t a threat to the United States or any other country at the moment. But taking Iran out has been a wet dream of the neocons for decades. Wars of choice, people, how fucking insane is that?

I once thought that despite America’s very checkered history we were a country with a decent heart and soul, that though we had the capacity to do tremendous harm, and frequently did, waging war wasn’t our first inclination when faced with a problem. I thought there were some things we agreed on, like the dignity of work, a fair wage, reasonable security from want, care for our young and our elderly, a shared sense that we were together. No more. Capitalism has destroyed America’s soul because it is a soulless system. We have become monstrous, deluded, cruel and belligerent. Trump’s bloated, snarling face is our face. America is in its death throes and our democracy is soon to be completely extinguished.  

Killing with Impunity

“Hate and ignorance have not driven the history of racist ideas in America. Racist policies have driven the history of racist ideas in America.” Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning.

How does an Israeli soldier shoot an unarmed Palestinian, a human being? What does the soldier feel as he or she brings a man or boy into the crosshairs? Is there any remorse after pulling the trigger, any flicker of conscience hours or days later? Dozens of non-violent Palestinian protesters have been killed by the Israeli Defense Forces in the past few weeks, thousands more wounded or injured. The protesters pose no lethal threat to Israel, they are not surging across the border, crossing from their occupied territory into Israel, and yet Israeli soldiers fire live ammunition into crowds. Think of the military officers who issue these shoot-to-kill orders. Why don’t Palestinian deaths matter? Palestinians are protesting the longest military occupation in modern history, an occupation that couldn’t be sustained without unquestioned backing from the United States. Why does my country support this slow, ongoing genocide?

To kill with impunity and without remorse requires indoctrination. You must convince your own people that you are killing inferiors or terrorists. Hitler’s regime indoctrinated many Germans to believe that Jews were the source of Germany’s problems, a blight on the purity of the German nation. Jews were systematically dehumanized, their rights abridged, their property stolen; but even this wasn’t enough, the Jews had to be exterminated, wiped out. Hasn’t Israel been doing the very same thing to Palestinians for more than half a century?

Israel has perfected the tactic of deflecting any and all criticism by shouting, screaming, and fulminating that all its critics are anti-Semitic. Israel has a right to exist as a state. It has a right to security. But it doesn’t have a right to murder unarmed people. It doesn’t have the right to bomb Gaza every few years in what is known in Israeli defense circles as “mowing the lawn.” It doesn’t have the right to control who and what enters or exits Gaza, the right to control Gaza’s airspace and territorial waters. Aside from the United States, no nation in the world gets away with murder like Israel does, year after year, decade after decade.

Short Takes:

The Trump kleptocracy is right on track, normalizing corruption, hastening the fall of the American empire. The oligarchs must know, on some level, that the end is near because they’re making a mad grab for as many spoils as they can haul.

Capitalism is killing us, and the planet. Goes to show that any ideology taken to extremes will produce tyranny.

Fukushima is now the worst nuclear disaster in history. Seven years gone and the media has no interest, as if by ignoring the calamity it will vanish. Kind of the same charade Trump and the Republicans play with anthropogenic climate change.

I was fortunate to meet author and activist Tasoula Hadjitofi when she visited Santa Barbara on April 29. I reviewed her book, The Icon Hunter, for the SB Independent. Hadjitofi is a gracious, intelligent and intrepid woman.

Fated to Hope

“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.” Eugene V. Debs

It’s never easy to confront the naked truth. It’s takes a big pair of balls because the truth isn’t pleasant. For instance, to confront the fact that climate change is more serious than even most scientists are willing to admit; that the United States is an immoral and murderous empire; that capitalism is a system of death and destruction. The American corporate media hide the truth behind a solid wall of bullshit and myth, turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the reality anyone can see if they but choose to open their eyes.

This is the thought that haunts me: my children are in for a dark and terrible ride and I can’t do much to help them because we don’t have money, stocks, bonds, real estate -- we’re working class -- living on wages, and my son is already in student loan debt, no fault of his own, he just wanted a shot at an education, and sure, he went about it all wrong, but should this doom him to a life of penury? In America, yes, it should, because this is a cruel and heartless nation ruled by oligarchs who live only to acquire more and more and more. There are 101 ways to make the working poor take it in the shorts: fees, usurious interest rates, penalties, rents, co-pays, all described in fine print written by corporate lawyers for the benefit of their masters. No one fights for the working class anymore. The working class -- white, black, brown, queer, trans -- is the carcass the rich feed on.

Pay attention to the intersection of capitalism, endless war, and environmental deterioration. Connect the dots.

Why do Americans accept that our country is engaged in an endless, futile, stupid war on a global scale? Why? Is it because there are no graphic images on our screens of bodies riddled with bullets or without limbs? Or because we don’t see flag-draped coffins being offloaded from aircraft? Or is it because there isn’t a draft? War is now, by design, out of sight and out of mind, happening elsewhere, far away, nothing at all for us to get worked up about. This isn’t the Vietnam era, college campuses are not seething with outrage; it’s as if our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Yemen and Somalia and Syria are not happening at all. And of course we don’t see the innocent victims.

I never voted for endless war.

I never voted for merciless, predatory capitalism to invade every corner and crevice of American life.

I never voted for a government overflowing with cretins.

This American nightmare doesn’t end with the rising sun. American vampires defy all the rules and hunt when the sun is at its apex, suck the blood of innocents in broad daylight, at the base of the Washington Monument, on the battlefield at Gettysburg, and in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge. At night the moon over America turns crimson and the stars look like molten tears.

How many can draw a sword and stand before the Truth, willing to fight to the death for the downtrodden, the infirm, the elderly and the feeble? How many will engage in a battle that they know is foreordained to end in their own demise?

The point of no return is far behind us. The Joker and the Jack of Hearts fuck with us for sport. And through the acrid smoke and the screams of the dying, we, the living, are fated to hope.  

The Rise of Ideological Monsters

“A country that stops taking care of its own, that loses the capacity for empathy and compassion, that crumples up human beings and throws them away when it is done with them, breeds dark ideological monsters that will inevitably rise to devour the body politic.” Chris Hedges

What day is it, and what has King Donald done to make America regret ever allowing him within a hundred miles of the White House? Has he launched another crazed Twitter war, insulted our European allies again, kissed up to any strongmen, or proposed giving away more of the commons to his corporate pals? It’s hard to keep up with every Trumpian outrage because they come hard and fast every day. I’m still digesting all the lies Trump spewed to justify pulling the US out of the Paris climate accord.

I wrote in my last blog that Trump is an aberration that we must not normalize, but in thinking about that further, the truth is that Trump is less an aberration than the logical product of a rotten and corrupt political system. I’ve made this observation several times before. The American electorate was given two horrible choices in November 2016 -- a grotesque egomaniacal buffoon with zero understanding about how our government or foreign policy works, and the undisputed queen of neoliberalism. This was a Hobson’s Choice. Although differing vastly in style, intelligence, experience and judgment, both Trump and Clinton are adherents of the neoliberal policies that are destroying our country.

What are those neoliberal policies? Well, speaking in broad but in no way comprehensive terms, neoliberalism starts with a fervent belief in the “Market.” The Market knows all and always acts fairly in its distribution of wealth and other booty; the Market is infallible; the Market is just and trustworthy, and clearly the best way to meet human needs like healthcare and housing.

Second, an undying belief that private companies do everything better than any government ever could, so the way to a better society, and a better world, is to privatize everything from water systems to public education to air traffic control to the electric grid to interstate highways to hospitals to military logistics. Because, you see, fine corporations like Enron, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Haliburton, AIG, Pfizer, Exxon-Mobil, and Countrywide Mortgage, just to name a few, are great and wonderful, and always act in the best interests of the general public. Rip us off to enrich their CEO’s? Never! Commit blatant acts of fraud? No way! Pollute the environment just to make a few more bucks for shareholders? C’mon, that never happens!

Third, a belief in trade policies that encourage the offshoring of labor to countries where wages are as low as dirt and where workers are unlikely to gripe about working conditions, pay, or health and safety concerns. The more silent and pliable workers are, the better. And if a few perish now and then, well, business is inherently risky, right?

Oh, and at home on the fruited plain, allow corporations and their allies in government to beat labor unions into submission and then extinction. Unions are bad! Democracy in the workplace is a hindrance to innovation, efficiency, and is blatantly un-American. What workers really want is insecurity! They want lower wages, fewer benefits, longer hours!

Fourth, a belief in monetary and tax policies (and low taxes on the wealthy are necessary because this produces jobs for the poor!) that favor capital and investors over labor and wage earners. And tied up with this general line of thought is the idea that Capitalism and Democracy are synonymous, one cannot exist without the other.

Fifth, and we must not forget this one, because it’s important, is undying devotion to the military-security-surveillance complex. We really can’t get along without 17 intelligence agencies or our archipelago of military bases that ring the world, and continuous warfare is just good business. An exceptional nation like the United States only employs its vast military might in the ongoing war of Good vs. Evil, to bring democracy and freedom to the oppressed and downtrodden, never to eliminate rivals or secure natural resources like oil and gas. We kill and destroy to advance peace!

The bloody hands of ideological monsters have my country by the throat.

XMAS AT WAL-MART

It’s Christmas-time at Wal-Mart
bargains in the aisles, on the shelves
brought to you by global capitalism

“Save money. Live better.”

Don’t ask how the trinkets are made
don’t lose sleep over the exploitation of unseen peasants
believe it’s all for the good of women
and children, dislocated farmers
whose labor turns the golden wheel
for the money changers in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles,
Tokyo, London

“Save money. Live better.”

Pile your cart high
with goodies

Made in China
The labels scream
Made in China
Factory of the world
Made in China
Home of the Communist capitalists

They’ve taken title to our soul, own us lock, stock,
barrels stacked higher than Washington’s
Monument

Don’t ask why it’s seven years since your last pay raise,
why you can’t afford to fix your teeth,
visit the doctor,
fill your tank with gasoline,
make the mortgage,
or send your deserving daughter to college

It was you and many like you who bought
one-way tickets to the end of the line,
slipped a comfortable noose around your own necks

You fell for the lie and the myth,
The short straw,
The hook, the line, and the sinker

Swallowed it and gagged on it

Don’t ask who stuck the dagger in the aorta
of the American Dream,
unless you’re willing to look long in the mirror

Are you living better?