Food From Far Away

I read the labels on the cardboard boxes I toss in the baler at the Market. Beef from Yosemite Valley. Bison from the high plains. Tomatoes, avocados, asparagus, and bell peppers from Mexico. Apples and grapes from Chile. Bananas from Ecuador and Guatemala. Crab meat from Vietnam. Shrimp from Thailand. Fresh fruits and vegetables and seafood year round, a miracle of international trade and commerce for those who can afford it. But do we ever pause to consider the human and environmental cost? Where I live we buy vegetables and fruits and seafood at a relatively inexpensive cost because at the start of the chain of growers, middlemen, brokers, distributors, trucking companies and retail stores, stands a supply of cheap, pliable, exploitable labor. The invisible people who plant, harvest and pack tomatoes and mangoes and celery and whatnot, who perform hard manual labor for hours each day. People with families, stories, a past and maybe hope for a future. Immigrants from neighboring countries with few legal rights. Migrants escaping war ravaged countries. Climate refugees waiting for the wheels of the immigration system to turn. The people growing our food are in many instances living the most precarious lives. 

But we don’t want to see them, do we? Out of sight, out of mind, abstract as our own death. Not our fault, it’s globalization, NAFTA, capitalism, the way it is. I didn’t make the rules. It’s life. I can’t help it if I earn a lot of money. Everyone has to pull themselves by their own shoe laces, bootstraps, and Velcro. 

I read all the labels and ask why some of these products can’t be produced domestically. Perhaps they can, but we’d pay more and maybe have access to less, be forced to wait for the seasons to change and certain fruits and vegetables to become available. Would that be the end of the world? Not for me, personally, maybe, but the possibility of a desire being unavailable is unthinkable to many. We’re conditioned from Amazon to Uber to DoorDash to expect immediate fulfillment; it’s a God-inspired right for certain human beings.  

Capitalism fucked up American agriculture as surely as it created virtual monopolies in banking, insurance, technology, telecommunications, airlines, and grocery chains. What are the main cash crops in the American heartland, corn and soybeans? Duo culture. Bad for the soil over time. Uses a lot of scarce water and pesticides, fertilizer.  Big agriculture, large scale, thousands of acres. Corporate-food. 

Because of our peculiar way of seeing the world, it’s not always easy to recognize that climate change is happening. But don’t take my word for it, just pay attention to the number of stories in the media about weather and water, and the locales where never-in-my-lifetime events are happening. Climate and food and humans are intertwined, like lovers.  

Long Nights in Loserville

“It was outside the realm of what happens, so incongruous and out of touch with the way things are meant to be in the world that people would deny and dismiss and discount anything you said because it didn’t fit with normality.” Tom Burgis, Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World

The White House must resemble a funeral parlor these days. Rank and file staffers tiptoe in the corridors, deathly afraid of causing any commotion that might further upset the Big Baby in the Oval Office. Trump has finally stopped throwing himself on the carpet and screaming “Fraud” at the top of his lungs, but he continues to hurl Big Mac’s and French fries from his gilded high-chair. The defeated Orange Menace has kept a low profile of late, with few public appearances, but he’s as active on Twitter as ever, and his camp is working the grift as hard as they can, hectoring supporters for contributions to fight the fraud and thwart the steal. Most of the money raised will go to retiring the campaign’s debts rather than fund doomed-to-fail legal challenges.

Even though the GOP is utterly Trump’s party, he lost while most Republican candidates fared just fine. That must really gall Trump. It’s a flashing example of how much he is disliked by the majority of American voters. But, and this is a question the Democrats need to answer, what do the results in House and Senate races say about the Democratic Party?  

I’m pretty certain that a Biden administration will not spend much time, if any, probing the many misdeeds committed by Trump and his gang of miscreants. Like Obama before him, who declined to go after the criminal bankers who caused the Great Recession, or George W. Bush administration officials who sanctioned torture in the failed War on Terror, it’s not in Biden’s nature. He’ll call America to turn from the past toward the future, and in so doing perpetuate the gangrene that afflicts the American political and economic system: lack of accountability. In case you haven’t noticed, accountability and punishment in America is reserved for the masses, not the elites. The masses are lucky if they get three strikes before the heavy hand of the law lands on them, and far too many people are put away for a single mistake. Trump deserves to swing for all the damage he has inflicted on our fragile democracy, our standing in the world, the environment, government agencies, the federal courts and race relations. And for playing deadly politics with the Covid pandemic, deceiving the American people about the seriousness of the Coronavirus for months on end. Mocking people for wearing masks. Calling it a hoax. Blaming the Chinese.  But it’s not only Trump. His many enablers deserve punishment, too, starting with Chief Ratfucker, Mitch McConnell. Measure orange jumpsuits for Lindsey Graham, Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan, Doug Collins, Kevin McCarthy, Kelly Loeffler, Louis Dejoy, and Stephen Miller. (Add one of those masks like Hannibal Lecter wore in Silence of the Lambs for Miller. He’s a creepy fucker.) The lot should be chained together and marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. 

I’m not holding my breath. 

The Cult of Trump may wither for lack of oxygen once the Orange Menace leaves the big stage, but it won’t disappear entirely because the conditions that gave rise to Donald Trump are still present. Cancerous cells don’t disappear of their own accord. The collective anger Trump tapped into in 2016, and spent the last four year stoking, won’t vanish. Millions of Americans are angry, frustrated, scared to death of the future and on the lookout for someone or something to blame. That impulse isn’t going away; it will continue to simmer. The Proud Boys and other groups of that malignant ilk, have enjoyed their fifteen minutes of fame and notoriety, dressing up in their camo gear, lacing up their boots, and dreaming of a country free of people of color.  In their twisted view it can all be made the way it never was -- a white man’s Garden of Eden. They seem to believe that we can return to the time when women stayed in the kitchen and Negroes and Mexicans knew their place, go back to the days when this was a Christian nation, ruled by the good book. Sorry, boys, you cannot unwind the clock. The world’s changed, the colonies look different now, America has competition, our country is already a rainbow, but you refuse to accept it. It messes up your story of victimhood at the hands of women, minorities, and Chinese factory workers. 

I saw a report recently that said that the pandemic has been a boon for billionaires. Since the start of the pandemic, America’s oligarchs have made money hand over fist while millions of working people have struggled to make the rent, buy food, and pay medical expenses. In times good or bad, the wealthy make out fine, but what’s happening now is madness. It’s painfully clear that the economy is completely rigged in favor of the wealthy. Working people are playing with a two-headed coin. The only way the masses win is if the coin lands on its edge, and how often does that happen? It took nearly half a century for the nation to get to this level of wealth inequality. It took gutting the New Deal, easing regulations on big business and putting a boot on the throat of organized labor; it took a reinterpretation of antitrust laws that allowed monopolies to form; it took numerous Supreme Court rulings that benefitted business and weakened the rights of workers, voters, and consumers; and it took massive tax cuts for corporations and the rich. Ever since Richard Nixon loaded the Supreme Court with business-friendly, conservative justices, working people and consumers have lost ground. 

The anger millions of Americans feel, and that Donald Trump skillfully harnessed against illegal immigrants, NAFTA, liberals, and China, is misdirected. That’s not what did us in; the style of capitalism we play is the culprit. Winner-Take-All. Too Big to Fail. No Monopoly Too Powerful. The Wall Street money guys, with help from Democrats and Republicans, killed the American Dream. 

 

The Isolation Diaries No. 10

“...danger from another kind of slavery...that would result from aggregations of capital in the hands of a few individuals and corporations controlling, for their own profit and advantage exclusively, the entire business of the country, including the production and sale of the necessities of life.” John Marshall Harlan, written in 1911.

The death toll from Covid-19 in the United States is nearing 4,000. 

The healthcare system in America, based on the profit motive, is a tragic and deadly joke. The all-powerful Free Market cannot, will not, ever, be capable of, or more to the point, willing, to provide healthcare to every American. Sooner or later, every human being will need healthcare, and when that day arrives, no human being should be denied care because he or she cannot afford care. Still think Medicare for All is a bad idea? Still think we cannot afford it as a society? 

What the fuck is wrong with this country? When did our soul shrivel up? When did we lose all belief in the dignity of work? Perhaps we never had such a belief. I suppose I’m a product of my generation, a kid whose father was a union meat cutter in the quarter century after World War II, the era before the idea really took hold that the only responsibility corporations had was to make a profit. Before the major bloodletting of the working class, de-industrialization, the Rust Belt, NAFTA, endless automation and the rise of finance capitalism, before the language and logic of the Market invaded every crevice of our lives.    

Are you feeling scattered, distracted, off-balance? I am. I also feel a sense of foreboding. My wife’s hours are being reduced, down to between ten and fifteen a week. This is understandable, and we will likely be able to survive it. Like most working Americans, we don’t have a cushion to fall back on in case the wheels totally fall off. 

Things Donald Trump knows “better than anybody”:

Windmills

South Korea

Science (all branches)

Islamic State

Pharmacology

I’m afraid Americans will forget how Trump and his gang bungled the federal response to this pandemic, from the nonchalant dismissals in January and February, the lies about availability of testing, scapegoating China, blaming the Obama Administration (we inherited a broken system, Trump claims, citing no evidence), failing to swiftly nationalize the production of ventilators, masks, gloves, gowns, swabs, and other protective products to protect frontline healthcare workers, and relieve hospitals and state governments of competing with each other for these critical items. How absurd is it for the state of New York to be locked in a bidding war (benefiting only the company that produces the product) with Michigan for life-saving equipment? This isn’t the time for profiteering, but try telling that to Donald Trump, who clearly believes these products should go to the highest bidder, not where they are most needed to save lives. 

Boast, bluster, brag (our tests are the best in the world, says Trump), bullshit, bully, bloviate. 

We cannot allow our memories to fade. With plenty of help from FOX News, Trump is trying to bury the facts under an avalanche of falsehoods, and the corporate media is helping with live coverage of Trump’s daily propaganda show. We can’t play this George Orwell-style and allow Trump to escape down the memory hole and evade responsibility for his lethal failure to act. Trump is a fraud and a grifter, with blood on his hands. Until the markets tumbled, Covid-19 was nothing more than an annoyance for him, and it wasn’t until the bodies started piling up that he seemed to grasp that not only is this thing real, but if he screwed up it could cost him a second term. He’s running his con against a deadly pandemic. We are his marks. 

I miss football. I was really looking forward to the reverse fixture between Manchester City and Real Madrid in the Champions League, and to see if Chelsea would finish in the Top 4 in the Premier League after an inconsistent first season under manager Frank Lampard. God, I miss football. 

In 23 days I will turn 61. 

This pandemic is why competence in government matters, and why the federal government can’t be treated like a stepchild, ignored, starved, ridiculed, and shoved under the stairs. Trump loaded his cabinet and key departments with toadies and sychophants, opportunists and petty thieves, dickheads who don’t know the first thing about public service. Coupled with Trump’s personal incompetence, is it any wonder the federal response to the pandemic has been disastrous? What we see happening today is why a second-rate reality TV personality can’t sit in the White House making life and death decisions. Every Republican who has turned a blind eye and deaf ear to Trump’s idiocy, racism, narcissism, and stupidity is a coward, a complicit coward. The GOP could have, should have, convicted and removed this dangerous fool from office in February, but with the exception of Mitt Romney, every last one fell in line to suck Trump’s flaccid penis. The first to fall to his knees and open his mouth was Mitch McConnell. Then came Lindsey Graham, who never rises from his knees or closes his mouth. Devin Nunes would hand over half his government salary for a chance to be sodomized by Donald Trump. 

Yes, I’m wound up today, very pissed off. 

If we have an election in November, our contestants will be Demented Donald Trump v. Decrepit Joseph Biden. A vote of what, for what? Obviously, at this point I’d vote for a mannequin if it meant chasing Donald Trump from the White House. But Joseph Biden, are you fucking kidding me? Not at a time like this. No, can’t be, say it ain’t so, say it ain’t Joe. When he comes on stage to accept the nomination for the Democrats, Biden will be dragging behind him a cloth sack full of stone tablets, each tablet inscribed with a statement, policy position, bill supported, and war agitated for during his long, banal public career. That sack might weigh a ton. 

The Fork In The Road

“Throughout the Western world the financial system has become an exploiter of the people and a deadweight loss on economies.” Paul Craig Roberts

Looks like we owe the Feds money again, but may get a refund from Jerry Brown, which means our tax dance for 2015 might be a wash. Had we owed both Federal and State I might have had a nervous breakdown. Our daughter is flunking Physics -- no surprise -- she hates the subject and doesn’t apply herself, and sooner or later will understand the relationship between effort and results. Mom and dad have to go meet with her teacher. The work we do for the money we need to sustain our life is often a soul-sucking grind, and like many Americans in the low-low middle class, though we claw we never seem to get ahead; one calamity and we’re toast. Maybe our lot will improve when Donald Trump becomes president. He’s a winner, or so he tells us at every opportunity, and when he wins, we win.

Forget I said that, I’m joking, of course. Trump, Clinton, Cruz, Rubio, nothing is going to change, no matter which of these people is elected. The American economy is a scam, a house of cards, operated by an oligarchy for the benefit of the oligarchy. As John Jay said when this nation was founded, “The people who own the country run it.”

The mass of people who work for wages understand this, and, at some level, they realize that it is the “system” that causes their struggles, not some fault of their own; not laziness or lack of will or initiative, but a system designed to make them, or keep them, poor. Trump spews plenty of garbage, but when he talks about how trade deals like NAFTA (thanks, Bill Clinton) have decimated the American working class, he’s right, and I think this is why he sounds like a savior to some people.

What about Bernie Sanders? Yes, if Sanders somehow overcomes the Clinton death grip on the Democratic Party and all its machinery, he might shake a few crumbs from the system, but his ability to do so will entirely depend on the makeup of Congress, and this is fraught with uncertainty because so many Democrats are now Republicans, ideologically speaking; Sanders might have difficulty pushing his agenda with Democrats in control of the House and Senate. Of course if those bodies remain in Republican control, Sanders would be stymied at every turn.

Both parties are corrupt, as is the entire electoral system. Voters are offered two unpalatable choices -- isn’t democracy grand! It’s like going to the dentist and being told that your cracked molar can be pulled with needle nose pliers or vice grips, which do you prefer? Politicians, at least at the national level, no longer trouble themselves representing the interests of the voters who elect them. Instead, they represent the corporations and wealthy donors who own them. This guarantees that the critical issues facing the nation will not be addressed, except at the most superficial level. And when it comes to an issue like climate change, superficial measures are a recipe for disaster and death.

Getting back to Trump and his traveling circus for a minute. What is his economic policy? Just win, baby? Knock the Chinese over the head with a two-by-four? Invade Mexico? Any voter -- white, black, brown, or rainbow colored -- who believes that Trump will improve their lot economically is flat nuts.  “I will make great deals,” is not a policy. Running an empire, even one bordering on collapse, is not the same as starring in a make-believe TV show. Blithely declaring that one will “strengthen” America’s military, when 54% of the discretionary budget is already being spent on America’s sprawling military apparatus is not only stupid, it’s suicidal. But that’s Trump. Buffoon, blowhard, egomaniac.

And as of today, the GOP frontrunner.

I’m too tired to think about a Hillary Clinton presidency. I despise the woman; she is mendacious and mediocre and malignant. In my mind, Hillary’s almost as frightening as Trump. Most of her experience is covered with a thick coat of failure, and she has blood beneath her fingernails.

How did America come to this pathetic fork in the road?

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. 

It's Just Brown People Dying

Imagine for a moment that in the last three years the murder rate in Toronto, Ontario and Vancouver, Canada had shot up 300%, and that by official government statistics more than 20,000 people had died at the hands of drug traffickers, small-time drug dealers, run-of-the-mill thugs and corrupt local, state and federal police. Imagine that Canada’s army now patrols the streets of the three cities, but despite the presence of armed troops, the murder rate continues at the same relentless pace. Some citizens claim the army itself is implicated in the killings. The government insists that the police and the court system are turning the tide, winning the war, but few arrests are ever made, even when murders happen in broad daylight on a crowded avenue. Everyone seems to know who the killers are, but nobody ever sees a thing.

If this were happening in Canada, what would the response be on this side of the border? Would the American media devote some precious airtime – say a quarter of the time devoted to Tiger Woods and his many mistresses -- to report on the killings? Would Diane Sawyer from ABC News or Katie Couric from CBS jet across the border for a hard-hitting interview with Canada’s Prime Minister? Would Anderson Cooper report live from the scene of a killing?

If this were happening in Canada, would it merit more than passing attention from the politicians and pundits in Washington D.C.?

Not to worry -- Canada is as peaceful as ever. It’s Mexico, our southern neighbor that is awash in violence and death and at a risk of becoming a completely failed state, though if you depend for information on the American news media, you’d hardly know it.

Why the selective myopia? Is it because most of the people being murdered are brown-skinned? Is this simply racism, writ large? Given the draconian law recently passed in Arizona – and let us hope the courts strike this perversity from the books - one wonders about the racist bent in the American character.

According to author and journalist Charles Bowden, the U.S. gives Mexico around a half billion dollars a year to fight the drug war. The money is used for training and equipment, logistics, and so on. Half a billion dollars in annual aid, but the war goes on and the murders continue at a pace that makes the U.S. death toll in Iraq look frivolous by comparison. The major drug cartels battle one another for control of territory and routes. Local, state and federal police are supposed to stop the cartels, disrupt supply lines and make arrests, but the “authorities” seem bent on capturing a piece of the business rather than shutting it down.

And, of course, drugs continue to flow across the border, arriving on schedule for those that want or need them.

Everything related to Mexico and the drug business is upside down, Alice in Wonderland style. The cartels are as well armed as the Mexican army, the police act like drug lords, the courts never convict anyone, and trust is the scarcest commodity in the country.

The drug trade has replaced foreign factories as the employer of choice for young Mexican men. Why slave in a maquiladora for peanut wages when you can make real money in the drug business? What’s the incentive to lead a virtuous life when everyone around you is living on the dim side of what law and order remains? The desire for a long life might lose currency when all seems destined to get worse, never better.

What is behind all this death and suffering? Sure, the American appetite for illegal drugs has played a supporting role, but isn’t it more systemic than that? What role has NAFTA played in changing Mexico’s economy? The trade treaty obliterated small farmers and sent thousands, perhaps millions, of people in search of work. When manufacturing jobs began to dry up because production moved to China – whose workers were willing to slave for even less than Mexicans -- millions of Mexican workers had little choice but to make the trek to El Norte. Hard to blame them: on one side, unemployment, drug killings, lawlessness, endemic official corruption, failed institutions; on the other, the unknown in a country that has grown increasingly inhospitable to Mexican immigrants, even though the economies of border states depend on a steady supply of Mexicans willing to do difficult, dangerous, dirty, tedious and low-paying jobs.

Today in Los Angeles it’s estimated that 100,000 people will march to protest Arizona’s new immigration law. Will this demonstration and others like it lead the U.S. to begin asking deeper, more fundamental questions about Mexico?

Don’t count on it.