Sickening....
Feb 25, 2016
The Evil Empire Has The World In A Death Grip by Dr Paul Craig Roberts
In my archives there is a column or two that introduces the reader to John Perkins’ important book,Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. An EHM is an operative who sells the leadership of a developing country on an economic plan or massive development project. The Hit Man convinces a country’s government that borrowing large sums of money from US financial institutions in order to finance the project will raise the country’s living standards. The borrower is assured that the project will increase Gross Domestic Product and tax revenues and that these increases will allow the loan to be repaid.
However, the plan is designed to over-estimate the benefits so that the indebted country cannot pay the principal and interest. As Perkins’ puts it, the plans are based on “distorted financial analyses, inflated projections, and rigged accounting,” and if the deception doesn’t work, “threats and bribes” are used to close the deal.
The next step in the deception is the appearance of the International Monetary Fund. The IMF tells the indebted country that the IMF will save its credit rating by lending the money with which to repay the country’s creditors. The IMF loan is not a form of aid. It merely replaces the country’s indebtedness to banks with indebtedness to the IMF.
To repay the IMF, the country has to accept an austerity plan and agree to sell national assets to private investors. Austerity means cuts in social pensions, social services, employment and wages, and the budget savings are used to repay the IMF. Privatization means selling oil, mineral and public infrastructure in order to repay the IMF. The deal usually imposes an agreement to vote with the US in the UN and to accept US military bases.
Occasionally a country’s leader refuses the plan or the austerity and privatization. If bribes don’t work, the US sends in the jackals—assassins who remove the obstacle to the looting process.
Perkins’ book caused a sensation. It showed that the United States’ attitude of helpfulness toward poorer countries was only a pretext for schemes to loot the countries. Perkins’ book sold more than a million copies and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 73 weeks.
Now the book has been reissued with the addition of 14 new chapters and a 30-page listing of Hit Man activity during the years 2004-2015- see The New Confessions Of An Economic Hitman.
Perkins shows that despite his revelations, the situation is worse than ever and has spread into the West itself. The populations of Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and the United States itself are now being looted by Hit Man activity.
Perkins’ book shows that the US is “exceptional” only in the unbridled violence it applies to others who get in its way. One of the new chapters tells the story of France-Albert Rene, president of Seychelles, who threatened to reveal the illegal and inhumane eviction of the residents of Diego Garcia by Britain and Washington so that the island could be converted into an air base from which Washington could bomb noncompliant countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Washington sent in a team of jackels to murder the president of Seychelles, but the assassins were foiled. All but one were captured, tried and sentenced to execution or prison, but a multi-million dollar bribe to Rene freed them. Rene got the message and became compliant.
In the original printing of his book, Perkins tells the stories of how jackals arranged airplane crashes to get rid of Panama’s non-compliant president, Omar Torrijos, and Ecuador’s non-compliant president, Jaime Roldos. When Rafael Correa became president of Ecuador, he refused to pay some of the illegitimate debts that had been piled on Ecuador, closed the United States’ largest military base in Latin America, forced the renegotiation of exploitative oil contracts, ordered the central bank to use funds deposited in US banks for domestic projects, and consistently opposed Washington’s hegemonic control over Latin America.
Correa had marked himself for overthrow or assassination. However, Washington had just overthrown in a military coup the democratically elected Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, whose policies favored the people of Honduras over those of foreign interests. Concerned that two military coups in succession against reformist presidents would be noticed, to get rid of Correa the CIA turned to the Ecuadoran police. Led by a graduate of Washington’s School of the Americas, the police moved to overthrow Correa but were overpowered by the Ecuadoran military. However, Correa got the message. He reversed his policies toward American oil companies and announced that he would auction off huge blocks of Eucador’s rain forests to the oil companies. He closed down, Fundacion Pachamama, an organization with which a reformed Perkins was associated that worked to preserve Ecuador’s rain forests and indigenous populations.
Western banks backed up by the World Bank are even worse looters than the oil and timber companies. Perkins writes: “Over the past three decades, sixty of the world’s poorest countries have paid $550 billion in principal and interest on loans of $540 billion, yet they still owe a whopping $523 billion on those same loans. The cost of servicing that debt is more than these countries spend on health or education and is twenty times the amount they receive annually in foreign aid. In addition, World Bank projects have brought untold suffering to some of the planet’s poorest people. In the past ten years alone, such projects have forced an estimated 3.4 million people out of their homes; the governments in these countries have beaten, tortured, and killed opponents of World Bank projects.”
Perkins describes how Boeing plundered Washington state taxpayers. Using lobbyists, bribes, and blackmail threats to move production facilities to another state, Boeing succeeded in having the Washington state legislature give the corporation a tax break that diverted $8.7 billion into Boeings’ coffers from health care, education and other social services. The massive subsidies legislated for the benefit of corporations are another form of rent extraction and Hit Man activity.
Perkins has a guilty conscience and still suffers from his role as a Hit Man for the evil empire, which has now turned to the plunder of American citizens. He has done everything he can to make amends, but he reports that the system of exploitation has multiplied many times and is now so commonplace that it no longer has to be hidden. Perkins writes:
“A major change is that this EHM system, today, is also at work in the United States and other economically developed countries. It is everywhere. And there are many more variations on each of these tools. There are hundreds of thousands more EHMs spread around the world. They have created a truly global empire. They are working in the open as well as in the shadows. This system has become so widely and deeply entrenched that it is the normal way of doing business and therefore is not alarming to most people.”
People have been so badly plundered by jobs offshoring and indebtedness that consumer demand cannot support profits. Consequently, capitalism has turned to exploiting the West itself. Faced with rising resistance, the EHM system has armed itself with “the PATRIOT Act, the militarization of police forces, a vast array of new surveillance technologies, the infiltration and sabotage of the Occupy movement, and the dramatic expansion of privatized prisons.” The democratic process has been subverted by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling and other court decisions, by corporate-funded political action committees, and by organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council financed by the One Percent. Cadres of lawyers, lobbyists, and strategists are hired to legalize corruption, and presstitutes work overtime to convince gullible Americans that elections are real and represent the workings of democracy.
In a February 19, 2016 article in OpEdNews, Matt Peppe reports that the American colony of Puerto Rico is being driven into the ground in order to satisfy foreign creditors.See http://www.opednews.com/articles/Puerto-Ricans-Suffer-as-Cr-by-Matt-Peppe-160219-676.html
The airport has been privatized, and the main highways have been privatized in a 40-year lease owned by a consortium formed by a Goldman Sachs infrastructure investment fund. Puerto Ricans now pay private corporations for the use of infrastructure that tax dollars built. Recently Puerto Rico’s sales tax was raised 64% to 11.5%. A sales tax increase is equivalent to a rise in inflation and results in a decline in real incomes.
Today the only difference between capitalism and gangsterism is that capitalism has succeeded in legalizing its gangsterism and, thus, can strike a harder bargain than can the Mafia.
Perkins shows that the evil empire has the world in the grip of a “death economy.”
He concludes that “we need a revolution” in order “to bury the death economy and birth the life economy.” Don’t look to politicians, neoliberal economists, and presstitutes for any help.
He concludes that “we need a revolution” in order “to bury the death economy and birth the life economy.” Don’t look to politicians, neoliberal economists, and presstitutes for any help.
___________________
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books areThe Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order
Houston, Meeting Spot for the Devil’s Assholes by Andrew Smolski
Houston, we have problem. Today, five jackasses with absolutely no plan to resolve any of the problems confronting America will take the stage in my hometown, at my alma mater. Five insufferable pieces of shit who sully humanity with their very presence will descend upon the H to spout nonsense and bullshit. If only that corrupt, corporate hack Hillary was with them, then I could hate all of ‘em at once. Damnit if I ain’t that lucky.
What a place for these false idols to debate. Houston, Texas, with suburbs chalked full of hateful, white Christians, a litany of criminal oil and gas companies like BP, and more than its share of oligarchs whose shit needs to be expropriated. It is an impeccable host for the clown car bringing the most fucked up show on Earth. What better place than this nightmarish ode to capitalist development with an almost completely absent public transit system. This explains the monstrous 16-lane superhighway. Hell isn’t other people, it is spending hours on end in your car, alone, breathing in benzene.
The stage they will degrade is off I-45 South at the University of Houston, which used to be the city’s affordable university. Under Renu Khator’s leadership it is slowly becoming a gentrifying, monstrous profit machine marching lockstep with the corporate agenda for higher education. Guess that makes it as good a venue as any for these psychopaths who would have us all worshipping the rich. Well, the rich plus a vengeful, genocidal god, who they claim gives a whole lot of shit about sodomy. And seriously, what an infamous cast of degenerate slime that will debate.
The Republican front-runner is an Oompa Loompa lookin’ racist prick who plans on surfing the tidal waves of hatred boiling below the surface of this empire right into the bastion of reaction, the White House. Another of these assholes is the wannabe native of my state who has all the characteristics of someone you want to kick the shit out of, and probably deserves the ass whoopin’. The fact that the folks back home elected him is a good enough reason for their eternal damnation. This is, of course, the opposite of their expectations when they meet St. Peter. Rounding out these idiots with a high probability of indiscriminately killing people around the world is a highly-trained puppet who hasn’t had an original thought during the entirety of his existence. The other two are there as stage props; one for gimmicky, father-like quips, and the other because he is apparently lost and refuses to admit it like most males.
If these faux-Hitlers and quasi-Pol Pots aren’t busy pushing to deport a population the size of Denmark and Sweden combined, they are calling to commit an exorbitant number of war crimes and breaking every international law imaginable. What, spending some 600+ billion dollars per year on the military isn’t enough? And if you don’t want people jumpin’ the border, then stop fuckin’ up their country. Same goes for the countless number of terrorists these morons created and will continue to create as they continue to sack the Middle East. Our only hope is they are interrupted by people no platforming them while “Mo’ City Don Freestyle” by Z-Ro plays on the loudspeakers.
That’s the only welcome to Houston these degenerates deserve.
__________
Andrew Smolski is a writer and sociologist.
Dr. Jill Stein On the Scam of American Politics
This is a very enlightening conversation which should be given some serious attention. What Americans need in these shaky times is a leader who can tell them the plain old truth, no matter how uncomfortable. We've been lied to, distracted, charmed & played by media pundits, business leaders and politicians for way too long. Aint it time to put an end to the bullshit???
Onelove
Feb 21, 2016
Cannibalizing Democracy
Have you wondered why politicians aren't what they used to be, why governments seem unable to solve real problems? Economist Yanis Varoufakis, the former Minister of Finance for Greece, says that it's because you can be in politics today but not be in power — because real power now belongs to those who control the economy. He believes that the mega-rich and corporations are cannibalizing the political sphere, causing financial crisis. In this talk, hear his dream for a world in which capital and labor no longer struggle against each other........ Quite an interesting Q/A session after this presentation
OneLove
The Clinton Monster That Won’t Die by Jason Hirthler
As the primaries shuffle their way across the republic toward the D-Day of Super Tuesday, it may be worth recalling the political soil from which Democratic contestant Hillary Clinton emerged. Not when she was a Goldwater conservative. Not when she was a governor’s wife in Little Rock. Not when she arrived in the Senate or in Barack Obama’s Cabinet. But rather when she rode her husband’s quisling charm into the Oval Office. She frequently seconded Bill’s opinions and—like any good spouse in a political marriage—campaigned on his behalf. That was the key moment when the Democratic Party finally secured its special place in hell, nestled inside the devil’s pantheon of world-historical sellouts.
But before it can climb atop its fiery plinth, it must die. Now, as a party of the people, the Democratic Party is already interred. But it has found new life as a party of the one percent. And looking at it now, one has to wonder—has it ever been healthier? That depends on whether Hillary can connive her way into office and secure the black flag of neoliberalism for the party. You know, that banner her husband hoisted over the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the misty dawn of our demise?
Nowhere Else To Go
The reason we breathe the political air we do has everything to do with the presidency of Bill Clinton. He was the corporate revolutionary that brought the Democratic Party back from the irrelevance of Mondale and Dukakis. After 12 years of Republican elitism masquerading as supply-side wisdom, Clinton’s genius was to simply become a Republican in Democratic cloth, guiding the party of labor into the cigar-scented embrace of big capital. He adopted the neoliberal strategies of the Reagan era, recasting them in the counterfeit clothing of progressive populism.
Rather than challenge the power of money in politics, he embraced it. His strategy of triangulation proved the perfect model for unlocking conservative streams of wealth and simultaneously putting the conservative party on their heels. Imagine a simple triangle. On the bottom left is a liberal opinion. On the bottom right is a conservative opinion. At the apex of the triangle—well, that is your policy. Smack in-between the progressive left and the conservative right. That meant, in practice, moving right on key issues. In response, the Republicans have carved out a new homestead along the frontier of anti-government extremism. No surprise, really. After all, here was some Arkansas arriviste pilfering their positions and passing them off as his own. Clinton lifted their ideas, pimped out his platform to their donors, and somehow convinced his base not to burn down the Democratic Party. How else could they react?
In the end, this Janus-faced Machiavelli had it both ways. On one hand, he maintained a rhetoric of empathy for the poor, the blue-collar worker, the paycheck-to-paycheck laborer, and never hesitated to express his sympathies on his whistle-stop tours. Tears crept into the crow-footed corners of faces in the crowd. He felt our pain. On the other hand—or with the other hand—he palmed check after check from large corporate interests, assuring them, in deed if not word, that his rhetoric was little more than a ruse to retain the progressive vote.
In office, Clinton pursued Republican objectives. He launched a prison-building empire, gutted welfare, deregulated the financial markets, produced astonishing tax breaks for the rich, passed a trade bill that destroyed American jobs and wrecked Mexican agribusiness, and decided there was no good reason to maintain a wall between the unscrupulous capitalist investor and unwitting depositor. After all, as the Nineties refrain went, banks can police themselves. All the while, of course, he continued to peddle his sincerest sympathies to Main Street.
America hasn’t been the same since. Not least because the very deregulatory policies Clinton approved gutted the global economy in 2008. From an electoral perspective, the Democrats need only shade slightly left of the Republican insurgents to appear like even-keeled moderates and win the liberal vote. This is the platform and plan of Hillary Clinton, too. Another neoliberal corporate presidency. Obviously the Clintons think their strategy can still prevail. After all, as Bill Clinton gleefully said of disillusioned progressives he knew would eventually return to the fold, “They have nowhere else to go.”
Rising Xenophobia
This is also why today vulgar populists like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz prey upon the thinly veiled prejudices of their nervous congregations. They tell terrible tales around the nightly campfire, conjuring spine-chilling scenarios that read like passages from the Book of Revelation. Those fears were nicely approximated by writer Rian Malan who, in Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums, described the fear of Afrikaners in South Africa’s Cape Town after the notorious Pass Laws were dismantled in the mid-Eighties:
“…it was if a distant dam had broken, allowing a mass of desperate and hopeful humanity to come flooding over the mountains and spread out across the Cape Flats. They came at the rate of eighty, ninety families a day, and built homes with their bare hands, using wooden poles, tin sheeting, bits and pieces of trash rescued from landfills and plastic garbage bags to keep out the rain. Within two years, the sand dunes had vanished under an enormous sea of shacks and shanties, as densely packed as a mediaeval city, and populated by fantastic characters—bootleggers, gangsters, prophets, Rastafarians, gun dealers and marijuana czars, plus almost a million ordinary working people.”
This is the apocalypse that has schemers like Cruz and Trump promising a new separation wall along our southern border—to the furious applause of jittery nativists. It’s why rightwing nationalists are setting up encampments across Europe. Anti-immigration is de rigueur, and the right predictably uses immigrants as scapegoats for the crimes of their party.
A Special Place In History?
Against this backdrop of bi-partisan desolation, the Democrats’ first-woman-in-the-white-house narrative rings hollow, especially so coming from a Clinton. Because some Millennial women are stumping for Sanders, she had to unearth veteran supplicant Madeleine Albright to rehearse her bona fides. Albright promptly condemned to hell women that didn’t help each other, i.e., elect Mrs. Clinton. But would Hillary really be a boon for her gender? Boomer women seem to think so, but should it be any truer for women than for African-Americans? Did black people prosper under Barack Obama? The great unifier presided over the worst economic period for African-Americans in recent history. Thanks to predatory lending, mortgage fraud, and other innovative forms of white-collar crime, black people lost half their net worth from the Great Recession. After the social advances of recent decades—endlessly enumerated in the corporate media—black people still on average have a handful of pennies for every crisp dollar in the calf-skinned wallet of a white man. (A 2014 PEW study had the average white household worth almost $142,000 and the average black household worth $11,000, the worst inequality between the two in a quarter century. Not to mention blacks have a higher poverty rate, higher unemployment, lower workforce participation, and plenty more.)
In 2008 some 95 percent of voting African-Americans cast votes for Barack Obama. One of them was Cornel West. His support had given Obama a patina of black progressivism that let the Illinois Senator affect a more appealing image before his base. Once in office, he gave nothing back. West ended up anointing Obama as Wall Street’s “black mascot.” Harsh but richly deserved. There’s one photo of the two that is particularly compelling. In it West reaches across a swarm of Obama sycophants to clutch the President’s hand. In West’s face one might read a poignant mix of honest enthusiasm, a kind of brittle anxiety, and the idolatrous glow of the duped. Holding West’s outstretched hand, Obama maintains his cool, but turns his head as though admonishing the too-hopeful West not to make “the perfect the enemy of the good.” In like manner, one can almost hear Hillary’s own shrill falsetto brushing aside Bernie Sanders’ naïve idealism and reminding the world that she’s “a progressive who gets things done.”
Getting Things Done
But gets what done, exactly? Positive change for women? Stable free-market democracies across the Arab world? To find out, one can consult Hillary’s record as Secretary of State, recently tabulated by Diana Johnston in her excellent Queen of Chaos. Then ask yourself, was Hillary a good Secretary of State for women? Are women better off in the now-dismembered Libya? Are they better off in the bloody steppes of Syria? In the amputated statelets of Iraq? The former senator had a hand in all of these cataclysmic injustices visited on poorly defended populations. Imagine the fury of powerless brown-skinned Arab mothers watching this gloating child of white privilege rehearse her moral certainties on the international news.
Moreover, Hillary has shown little understanding that her work as Secretary of State was a catastrophe for the Middle East. Her public statements seem to be a combination of mendacity, compartmentalization, and ignorance. For instance, she implied the Obama administration lacked an “organizing principle.” She knows very well it has an organizing principle, based on the neoconservative roadmap crafted by Paul Wolfowitz and others back in Bill Clinton’s heyday. But this was nothing more than political expediency. (Destabilized by the Sanders campaign, she now sees the Obama era as a crutch rather than a liability.) Clinton also said not intervening earlier in Syria led to the rise of ISIS. It may be possible she believes this, having fully absorbed the appropriate talking points for a secretary of state of an aggressive expansionist empire. But reality is the exact opposite—our intervention produced the expansion of ISIS power and the broader calamity of the proxy conflict.
Johnston also provides a succinct description of the neoliberal program that Hillary fronts across the domestic and international arena, as did her beloved Bill:
“…a world tied together by the universal penetration of financial markets in every sector of each national economy, thus allowing international capital to shape production, trade, and services via their own investment choices. This has radical political implications. In their efforts to attract mobile capital, nation-states are expected to lower dissuasive taxes and provide widened investment possibilities by privatization even of the most vital national activities, such as education and basic utilities. This leaves the national government without resources to ensure public welfare, to develop industry and farming, to redistribute wealth through public services. The gap between rich and poor widens radically.”
Radical Privilege
Hillary and her clan of faux progressives represent an isthmus of privilege in a proletarian sea. If she wins, Hillary will doubtless confirm a few piteous maxims about the human race: any color, creed, or gender is capable of being as cruel as any other and, in the end, greed is our greatest vice.
Celebrated author Ta Nihisi Coates, who penned the insightfulBetween the World and Me and now graphs for The Atlantic, gets to the heart of the problem in a recent essay on Hillary. He points out what real radicalism is, in contrast to Clinton’s “evasion.”
“So ‘divisive’ was Abraham Lincoln’s embrace of abolition that it got him shot in the head. So ‘divisive’ was Lyndon Johnson’s embrace of civil rights that it fractured the Democratic Party. So ‘divisive’ was Ulysses S. Grant’s defense of black civil rights and war upon the Klan, that American historians spent the better part of a century destroying his reputation. So ‘divisive’ was Martin Luther King Jr. that his own government bugged him, harassed him, and demonized him until he was dead.”
Risk is not a term in the Clinton clan’s tiresome lexicon of accommodation and aggrandizement. Hillary would rather sit on her isthmus, sipping a cocktail in the sun, watching her imperial charges bludgeon their way across Eurasia. There’s a certain sense of superiority that comes from duping the masses. Just ask Bill.
Or ask Henry Kissinger, of whom Hillary wrote so affably in a recentreview of the war criminal’s latest parcel of wisdom. Now 92, Henry doesn’t mince words. Just close your eyes and listen to that soothing baritone rippling with gravitas remind us that, “It’s not a matter of what is true that counts, but what is perceived to be true.” You couldn’t sum up the Clinton political strategy any better. To be sure, if Hillary wins the nomination, it will be because we have read our Krugman and our Brooks, and have endorsed the lie that it isn’t meet to ask for what we want, but rather to settle for an ersatz replica of something we once believed in. Rather than waste a vote on the “unelectable,” we ought to elect a charmless political lifer with a handbag of bootless pledges and a mountain of dirty money.
_____________________________
The Mad Violence of Casino Capitalism by Henry A. Giroux
American society is morally bankrupt and politically broken, and its vision of the future appears utterly dystopian. As the United States descends into the dark abyss of an updated form of totalitarianism, the unimaginable has become imaginable in that it has become possible not only to foresee the death of the essential principles of constitutional democracy, but also the birth of what Hannah Arendt once called the horror of dark times. The politics of terror, a culture of fear, and the spectacle of violence dominate America’s cultural apparatuses and legitimate the ongoing militarization of public life and American society.
Unchecked corporate power and a massive commodification, infantilization, and depoliticization of the polity have become the totalitarian benchmarks defining American society. In part, this is due to the emergence of a brutal modern-day capitalism, or what some might call neoliberalism. This form of neoliberal capitalism is a particularly savage, cruel, and exploitative regime of oppression in which not only are the social contract, civil liberties and the commons under siege, but also the very notion of the political, if not the planet itself. The dystopian moment facing the United States, if not most of the globe, can be summed up in Fred Jameson’s contention “that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” He goes on to say that “We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.”1
One way of understanding Jameson’s comment is through the ideological and affective spaces in which the neoliberal subject is produced and market-driven ideologies are normalized. Capitalism has made a virtue out of self-interest and the pursuit of material wealth and in doing so has created a culture of shattered dreams and a landscape filled with “Broken highways, bankrupt cities, collapsing bridges, failed schools, the unemployed, the underpaid and the uninsured: all suggest a collective failure of will. These shortcomings are so endemic that we no longer know how to talk about what is wrong, much less set about repairing it.”[i]
Yet, there is a growing recognition that casino capitalism is driven by a kind of mad violence and form of self-sabotage and that if it does not come to an end what we will experience in all probability is the destruction of human life and the planet itself. Certainly, more recent scientific reports on the threat of ecological disaster from researchers at the University of Washington, NASA, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reinforce this dystopian possibility.2 The undermining of public trust and public values has now given way to a market-driven discourse that produces a society that has lost any sense of democratic vision and social purpose and in doing so resorts to state terrorism, the criminalization of social problems, and culture of cruelty. Institutions that were once defined to protect and enhance human life now function largely to punish and maim.
As Michael Yates points out throughout this book, capitalism is devoid of any sense of social responsibility and is driven by an unchecked desire to accumulate capital at all costs. As power becomes global and politics remains local, ruling elites no longer make political concessions to workers or any other group that they either exploit or consider disposable.
Security and crisis have become the new passwords for imposing a culture of fear and for imposing what Giorgio Agamben has called a permanent state of
exception and a technology of government repression.[ii] A constant appeal to a state of crisis becomes the new normal for arming the police, curtailing civil liberties, expanding the punishing state, criminalizing everyday behavior, and supressing dissent. Fear now drives the major narratives that define the United States and give rise to dominant forms of power free from any sense of moral and political conviction, if not accountability.
exception and a technology of government repression.[ii] A constant appeal to a state of crisis becomes the new normal for arming the police, curtailing civil liberties, expanding the punishing state, criminalizing everyday behavior, and supressing dissent. Fear now drives the major narratives that define the United States and give rise to dominant forms of power free from any sense of moral and political conviction, if not accountability.
In the midst of this dystopian nightmare, there is the deepening abyss of inequality, one that not only separates the rich from the poor, but also increasingly relegates the middle and working classes to the ranks of the precariat. Concentrations of wealth and income generate power for the financial elite and unchecked misery for most people, a fear/insecurity industry, and a growing number of social pathologies.
Michael Yates in The Great Inequality provides a road map for both understanding the registers that produce inequality as well as the magnitude of the problems it poses across a range of commanding spheres extending from health care and the political realm to the environment and education. At the same time, he exposes the myths that buttress the ideology of inequality. These include an unchecked belief in boundless economic growth, the notion that inequality is chosen freely by individuals in the market place, and the assumption that consumption is the road to happiness. Unlike a range of recent books on inequality, Yates goes beyond exposing the mechanisms that drive inequality and the panoply of commanding institutions that support it. He also provides a number of strategies that challenge the deep concentrations of wealth and power while delivering a number of formative proposals that are crucial for nurturing a radical imagination and the social movements necessary to struggle for a society that no longer equates capitalism with democracy.
As Yates makes clear throughout this book, money now engulfs everything in this new age of disposability. Moreover, when coupled with a weakening of movements to counter the generated power of capitalists, the result has been a startling increase in the influence of predatory capitalism, along with inequities in wealth, income, power, and opportunity. Such power breeds more than anti-democratic tendencies, it also imposes constraints, rules, and prohibitions on the 99 percent whose choices are increasingly limited to merely trying to survive. Capitalists are no longer willing to compromise and have expanded their use of power to dominate economic, political, and social life. For Yates, it is all the more crucial to understand how power works under the reign of global capitalism in order to grasp the magnitude of inequality, the myriad of factors that produce it, and what might be done to change it.
Accompanying the rise of a savage form of capitalism and the ever-expanding security state is the emergence of new technologies and spaces of control. One consequence is that labor power is increasing produced by machines and robotic technologies which serve to create “a large pool of more or less unemployed people.” Moreover, as new technologies produce massive pools of unused labor, it also is being used as a repressive tool for collecting “unlimited biometric and genetic information of all of its citizens.”[iii]
The ongoing attack on the working class is matched by new measures of repression and surveillance. This new weaponized face of capitalism is particularly ominous given the rise of the punishing state and the transformation of the United States from a democracy in progress to a fully developed authoritarian society. Every act of protest is now tainted, labeled by the government and mainstream media as either treasonous or viewed as a potential act of terrorism. For example, animal rights activists are put on the terrorist list. Whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden are painted as traitors. Members of the Black Lives Matter movement are put under surveillance,[iv] all electronic communication is now subject to government spying, and academics who criticize government policy are denied tenure or worse.
Under neoliberalism, public space is increasingly converted into private space undermining those sphere necessary for developing a viable sense of social responsibility, while also serving to transform citizenship into mostly an act of consumption. Under such circumstances, the notion of crisis is used both to legitimate a system of economic terrorism as well as to accentuate an increasing process of depoliticization. Within this fog of market induced paralysis, language is subject to the laws of capitalism, reduced to a commodity, and subject to the “tyranny of the moment….emaciated, impoverished, vulgarized and squeezed out of the meanings it was resumed to carry.”[v]
As the latest stage of predatory capitalism, neoliberalism is part of a broader economic and political project of restoring class power and consolidating the rapid concentration of capital, particularly financial capital.[vi] As a political project it includes “the deregulation of finance, privatization of public services, elimination and curtailment of social welfare programs, open attacks on unions, and routine violations of labor laws.”[vii] As an ideology, it casts all dimensions of life in terms of market rationality, construes profit making as the arbiter and essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and upholds the irrational belief that the market can both solve all problems and serve as a model for structuring all social relations. As a mode of governance, it produces identities, subjects, and ways of life driven by a survival-of-the fittest-ethic, grounded in the idea of the free, possessive individual, and committed to the right of ruling groups and institutions to exercise power removed from matters of ethics and social costs. As a policy and political project, it is wedded to the privatization of public services, the dismantling of the connection of private issues and public problems, the selling off of state functions, liberalization of trade in goods and capital investment, the eradication of government regulation of financial institutions and corporations, the destruction of the welfare state and unions, and the endless marketization and commodification of society.
Nothing engenders the wrath of conservatives more than the existence of the government providing a universal safety net, especially one that works, such as either Medicare or Social Security. As Yates points out, government is viewed by capitalists as an institution that gets in the way of capital. One result is a weakening of social programs and provisions. As Paul Krugman observes regarding the ongoing conservative attacks on Medicare, “The real reason conservatives want to do away with Medicare has always been political: It’s the very idea of the government providing a universal safety net that they hate, and they hate it even more when such programs are successful.”[viii] In opposition to Krugman and other liberal economists, Michael Yates argues rightly in this book that the issue is not simply preserving Medicare but eliminating the predatory system that disavows equality of wealth, power, opportunity, and health care for everyone.
Neoliberalism has put an enormous effort into creating a commanding cultural apparatus and public pedagogy in which individuals can only view themselves as consumers, embrace freedom as the right to participate in the market, and supplant issues of social responsibility for an unchecked embrace of individualism and the belief that all social relation be judged according to how they further one’s individual needs and self-interests. Matters of mutual caring, respect, and compassion for the other have given way to the limiting orbits of privatization and unrestrained self-interest, just as it is has become increasingly difficult to translate private troubles into larger social, economic, and political considerations. One consequence is that it has become more difficult for people to debate and question neoliberal hegemony and the widespread misery it produces for young people, the poor, middle class, workers, and other segments of society– now considered disposable under neoliberal regimes which are governed by a survival-of-the fittest ethos, largely imposed by the ruling economic and political elite. Unable to make their voices heard and lacking any viable representation in the process makes clear the degree to which the American public, in particular, are suffering under a democratic deficit producing a profound dissatisfaction that does not always translate into an understanding of how neoliberal capitalism has destroyed democracy or what it might mean to understand and challenge its diverse apparatuses of persuasion and power. Clearly, the surge of popularity behind the presidential candidacy of a buffoon such as Donald Trump testifies to both a deep seated desire for change and the forms it can take when emotion replaces reason and any viable analysis of capitalism and its effects seem to be absent from a popular sensibility.
What Michael Yates makes clear in this incisive book on inequality is that democratic values, commitments, integrity, and struggles are under assault from a wide range of sites in an age of intensified violence and disposability. Throughout the book he weaves a set of narratives and critiques in which he lays bare the anti-democratic tendencies that are on display in a growing age of lawlessness and disposability. He not only makes clear that inequality is not good for the economy, social bonds, the environment, politics, and democracy, Yates also argues that capitalism in the current historical moment is marked by an age that thrives on racism, xenophobia, the purported existence of an alleged culture of criminality, and a massive system of inequality that affects all aspects of society. Worth repeating is that at the center of this book, unlike so many others tackling inequality, is an attempt to map a number of modalities that give shape and purpose to widespread disparities in wealth and income, including the underlying forces behind inequality, how it works to secure class power, how it undermines almost every viable foundation needed for a sustainable democracy, and what it might mean to develop a plan of action to produce the radical imagination and corresponding modes of agency and practice that can think and act outside of the reformist politics of capitalism.
Unlike so many other economists such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz who address the issue of inequality, Yates refuses the argument that the system is simply out of whack and can be fixed. Nor does he believe that capitalism can be described only in terms of economic structures. Capitalism is both a symbolic pathological economy that produces particular dispositions, values, and identities as well as oppressive institutional apparatuses and economic structures. Yates goes even further arguing that capitalism is not only about authoritarian ideologies and structures, it is also about the crisis of ideas, agency, and the failure of people to react to the suffering of others and to the conditions of their own oppression. Neoliberal capitalism has no language for human suffering, moral evaluation, and social responsibility. Instead, it creates a survival-of-the fittest ethos buttressed by a discourse that is morally insensitive, sadistic, cannibalistic, and displays a hatred of those whose labor cannot be exploited, do not buy into the consumerist ethic, or are considered other by virtue of their race, class, and ethnicity. Neoliberalism is the discourse of shadow games, committed to highlighting corporate power and making invisible the suffering of others, all the while leaving those considered disposable in the dark to fend for themselves.
Yates makes visible not only the economic constraints that bear down on the poor and disposable in the neoliberal age of precarity, he also narrates the voices, conditions, hardships and suffering workers have to endure in a variety of occupations ranging from automobile workers and cruise ship workers to those who work in restaurants and as harvester on farms. He provides a number of invaluable statistics that chart the injuries of class and race under capitalism but rather than tell a story with only statistics and mind boggling data, he also provides stories that give flesh to the statistics that mark a new historical conjuncture and a wide range of hardships that render work for most people hell and produce what has been called the hidden injuries of class. Much of what he writes is informed by a decade long research trip across the United States in which he attempted to see first-hand what the effects of capitalism have been on peoples’ lives, the environment, work, unions, and other crucial spheres that inform everyday life. His keen eye is particularly riveting as he describes his teaming up with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in the 1970s and his growing disappointment with a union that increasingly betrayed its own principles.
For Yates, the capitalist system is corrupt, malicious, and needs to be replaced. Capitalism leaves no room for the language of justice, the social, or, for that matter, democracy itself. In fact, one of its major attributes is to hide its effects of power, racial injustice, militarized state violence, domestic terrorism, and new forms of disposability, especially regarding those marginalized by class and race. The grotesque inequalities produced by capitalism are too powerful, deeply rooted in the social and economic fabric, and unamenable to liberal reforms. Class disparities constitute a machinery of social death, a kind of zombie-like machine that drains life out of most of the population poisoning both existing and future generations.
The politics of disposability has gone mainstream as more and more individuals and groups are now considered surplus and vulnerable, consigned to zones of abandonment, surveillance, and incarceration. At one level, the expansive politics of disposability can be seen in the rising numbers of homeless, the growing army of debt-ridden students, the increasingly harsh treatment of immigrants, the racism that fuels the school-to-prison pipeline, and the growing attack on public servants. On another level, the politics of disposability has produced a culture of lawlessness and cruelty evident by the increasing rollback of voting rights, the war waged against women’s reproductive rights, laws that discriminate against gays, the rise of the surveillance state, and the growing militarization of local police forces. Yates argues convincingly that there is a desperate need for a new language for politics, solidarity, shared responsibilities, and democracy itself. Yates sees in the now largely departed Occupy Movement an example of a movement that used a new discourse and set of slogans to highlight inequality, make class inequities visible, and to showcase the workings of power in the hands of the financial elite. For Yates, Occupy provided a strategy that can be and is being emulated by a number of groups, especially those emerging in the black community in opposition to police violence. Such a strategy begins by asking what a real democracy looks like and how does it compare to the current society in which we live. One precondition for individual and social agency is that the horizons for change must transcend the parameters of the existing society, and the future must be configured in such a way as to not mimic the present.
What is remarkable about The Great Inequality is that Yates does not simply provide a critique of capitalism in its old and new forms, he also provides a discourse of possibility developed around a number of suggested policies and practices designed to not reform capitalism but to abolish it. This is a book that follows in the manner of Dr. Martin Luther King’s call to break the silence. In it Yates functions as a moral witness in reporting on the hardships and suffering produced by grotesque forms of inequality. As such, he reveals the dark threats that capitalism in its ruthlessly updated versions poses to the planet. Yet, his narrative is never far from either hope or a sense that there is a larger public for whom his testimony matters and that such a public is capable of collective resistance. The Great Inequality also serves to enliven the ethical imagination, and speak out for those populations now considered outcast and voiceless. Yates provides a furious reading of inequality and the larger structure of capitalism. In doing so he exhibits a keen and incisive intellect along with a welcomed sense of righteous fury.
Notes.
[i] Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land, (New York, N.Y.: The Penguin Press, 2010), p. 12.
[ii] Giorgio Agamben, “The Security State and a theory of destituent power,” Philosophers for Change, (February 25, 2014). Online:
http://philosophersforchange.org/2014/02/25/the-security-state-and-a-theory-of-destituent-power/
[iii] Ibid., Agamben, “The Security State and a theory of destituent power,”
[iv] George Joseph, “Exclusive: feds regularly monitored black lives matter since ferguson,” Intercept (July 24, 2015). Online: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/24/documents-show-department-homeland-security-monitoring-black-lives-matter-since-ferguson/; Deirdre Fulton, “Exposed: Big Brother Targets Black Lives:Government spying can be an ‘effective way to chill protest movements,’ warns Center for Constitutional Rights,”CommonDreams (July 24, 2015). Online: http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/07/24/exposed-big-brother-targets-black-lives
[v] Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, Moral Blindness: The loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), p. 46.
[vi] I have taken up the issue of neoliberalism extensively in Henry A. Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder: Paradigm, 2008) . See also, David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy, Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Gerad Dumenil and Dominique Levy,The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). Henry A. Giroux, Twilight of the Social (Boulder: Paradigm, 2013); Henry A. Giroux, and in Against the Violence of Organized Forgetting: Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine (San Francisco: City Lights, 2014);
Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge: Zone Books 2015).
[vii] Michael D. Yates, “Occupy Wall Street and the Significance of Political Slogans,” Counterpunch, (February 27, 2013). Online:http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/27/occupy-wall-street-and-the-significance-of-political-slogans/
[viii] Paul Krugman, “Zombies Against Medicare,” New York Times(July 27, 2015). Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/opinion/zombies-against-medicare.html?_r=0
_______________________
This essay is excerpted from the introduction to The Great Inequalityby Michael D. Yates.
More articles by:
Feb 19, 2016
We Don’t Need White Approval: Why the Oscars and Grammys Don’t Appreciate Black Art by Lawrence Ware
Racism is a white problem. Yes, the nature of racism and the system of white supremacy is such that sun kissed populaces often experience the underside of the American democratic experiment, but, I maintain, racism is a white problem.
Those accustomed to white supremacy are terrified by black political and cultural self-sufficiency. Part of what made the Black Panthers so terrifying was their lack of interest in what white folks thought of what they said or how they lived. A sure way to become divisive is to live in a way that centers blackness, not whiteness. What is ironic about this fear is that individuals who pushed back against white supremacy are the ones that moved America toward actualizing her ideals.
Black folks advocating for the right to vote, to attend a desegregated school, to overcome housing segregation were all doing a service to this democratic experiment. Black Americans are a major part of why America has the potential to be great. You can have Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, give me Stokely Carmichael and Ella Baker. Some of the greatest Americans have been black men and women advocating and agitating for their rights. Yet, despite this truth, many today engage in practices that center whiteness.
When we need the approval and validation of the dominant group in order for us to see our own work as valuable and worthy, we engage in a vicious form of internalized racism—one that centers whiteness even as we engage in the subversive work of expressing black brilliance.
This begs the question: Do we have the ability to live free of white supremacist thinking? Can we see and appreciate black beauty without the oppressive lens of euro-normativity filtering our gaze? Are we able to validate achievement without whiteness as the standard for excellence?
Of late, much attention has been paid to the racial homogeneity of the Academy Awards. For the second year in a row, the nominees in the major acting categories have been all white. There are calls to boycott the Oscars, and the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite has been trending now for months. This is reminiscent of a few years ago when there was outrage over Macklemore’s The Heist sweeping the rap category at the 2014 Grammy Awards. Many were critical of the Grammys because Kendrick Lamar’s beautiful, polyvalent Good kid, M.A.A.D. City was largely ignored.
This did not surprise me. There is historical precedent of white folks being celebrated for appropriating black culture. That’s why Elvis Presley is honored and not Big Mamma Thornton. That’s why Led Zeppelin is celebrated while Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon are largely forgotten. That’s why the Beach Boys’s Surfin USA is cherished and Chuck Berry’s Sweet Sixteen is barely remembered. Most white Americans want a black sound and black culture without actual black people.
Too often we sit at the door of White America asking them to recognize us. We perpetually celebrate the first of us that white folks allowed to hold a position. We are consistently outraged when white institutions do what they were created to do and marginalize people of color. We constantly demean and ghettoize the NAACP Image Awards, the BET Awards, and other spaces that have historically made room for and celebrated black brilliance.
When you convey more worth to white access and recognition than you do to black affirmation, you participate in your own oppression. We need to support, protect, and prioritize those spaces that celebrate our blackness, not award shows that tokenize our culture.
At the 2016 Grammy Awards, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly was recognized five times, but Taylor Swift’s catchy, yet shallow 1989 garnered her second Grammy for Album of the Year. While I’m happy for him, we should never use a white standard of excellence to assess black talent. TPAB, like Beyonce’s “Formation”, was not made for white people—and I do not expect White institutions to celebrate it.
I am reminded of the words W.E.B. Du Bois wrote to eulogize the brilliant scientist Carter G. Woodson: “No white university ever recognized his work; no white scientific society ever honored him. Perhaps this was his greatest honor.” When white institutions fail to appreciate the work of black folks, we should not be outraged. We should consider it an honor.
Feb 10, 2016
The Shock Doctrine
In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world– through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.
At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts…. New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.
Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.
The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas through our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998.
Feb 7, 2016
10 Things They Won’t Tell You About the Flint Water Tragedy by Michael Moore
News of the poisoned water crisis in Flint has reached a wide audience around the world. The basics are now known: the Republican governor, Rick Snyder, nullified the free elections in Flint, deposed the mayor and city council, then appointed his own man to run the city. To save money, they decided to unhook the people of Flint from their fresh water drinking source, Lake Huron, and instead, make the public drink from the toxic Flint River.
When the governor’s office discovered just how toxic the water was, they decided to keep quiet about it and covered up the extent of the damage being done to Flint’s residents, most notably the lead affecting the children, causing irreversible and permanent brain damage. Citizen activists uncovered these actions, and the governor now faces growing cries to resign or be arrested.
Here are 10 things that you probably don’t know about this crisis because the media, having come to the story so late, can only process so much. But if you live in Flint or the State of Michigan as I do, you know all too well that what the greater public has been told only scratches the surface.
1. While the Children in Flint Were Given Poisoned Water to Drink, General Motors Was Given a Special Hookup to the Clean Water. A few months after Gov. Snyder removed Flint from the clean fresh water we had been drinking for decades, the brass from General Motors went to him and complained that the Flint River water was causing their car parts to corrode when being washed on the assembly line. The governor was appalled to hear that GM property was being damaged, so he jumped through a number of hoops and quietly spent $440,000 to hook GM back up to the Lake Huron water, while keeping the rest of Flint on the Flint River water. Which means that while the children in Flint were drinking lead-filled water, there was one—and only one—address in Flint that got clean water: the GM factory.
2. For Just $100 a Day, This Crisis Could’ve Been Prevented. Federal law requires that water systems which are sent through lead pipes must contain an additive that seals the lead into the pipe and prevents it from leaching into the water. Someone at the beginning suggested to the governor that they add this anti-corrosive element to the water coming out of the Flint River. “How much would that cost?” came the question. “$100 a day for three months,” was the answer. I guess that was too much, so, in order to save $9,000, the state government said f*** it—and as a result the State may now end up having to pay upwards of $1.5 billion to fix the mess.
3. There’s More Than the Lead in Flint’s Water. In addition to exposing every child in the city of Flint to lead poisoning on a daily basis, there appears to be a number of other diseases we may be hearing about in the months ahead. The number of cases in Flint of Legionnaires Disease has increased tenfold since the switch to the river water. Eighty-seven people have come down with it, and at least ten have died. In the five years before the river water, not a single person in Flint had died of Legionnaires Disease. Doctors are now discovering that another half-dozen toxins are being found in the blood of Flint’s citizens, causing concern that there are other health catastrophes which may soon come to light.
4. People’s Homes in Flint Are Now Worth Nothing Because They Cant Be Sold. Would you buy a house in Flint right now? Who would? So every homeowner in Flint is stuck with a house that’s now worth nothing. That’s a total home value of $2.4 billion down the economic drain. People in Flint, one of the poorest cities in the U.S., don’t have much to their name, and for many their only asset is their home. So, in addition to being poisoned, they have now a net worth of zero. (And as for employment, who is going to move jobs or start a company in Flint under these conditions? No one.) Has Flint’s future just been flushed down that river?
5. While They Were Being Poisoned, They Were Also Being Bombed. Here’s a story which has received little or no coverage outside of Flint. During these two years of water contamination, residents in Flint have had to contend with a decision made by the Pentagon to use Flint for target practice. Literally. Actual unannounced military exercises—complete with live ammo and explosives – were conducted last year inside the city of Flint. The army decided to practice urban warfare on Flint, making use of the thousands of abandoned homes which they could drop bombs on. Streets with dilapidated homes had rocket-propelled grenades fired upon them. For weeks, an undisclosed number of army troops pretended Flint was Baghdad or Damascus and basically had at it. It sounded as if the city was under attack from an invading army or from terrorists. People were shocked this could be going on in their neighborhoods. Wait—did I say “people?” I meant, Flint people. As with the governor, it was OK to abuse a community that held no political power or money to fight back. BOOM!
6. The Wife of the Governor’s Chief of Staff Is a Spokeswoman for Nestle, Michigan’s Largest Owner of Private Water Reserves. As Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein: “Follow the money.” Snyder’s chief of staff throughout the two years of Flint’s poisoning, Dennis Muchmore, was intimately involved in all the decisions regarding Flint. His wife is Deb Muchmore, who just happens to be the spokesperson in Michigan for the Nestle Company—the largest owner of private water sources in the State of Michigan. Nestle has been repeatedly sued in northern Michigan for the 200 gallons of fresh water per minute it sucks from out of the ground and bottles for sale as their Ice Mountain brand of bottled spring water. The Muchmores have a personal interest in seeing to it that Nestles grabs as much of Michigan’s clean water was possible—especially when cities like Flint in the future are going to need that Ice Mountain.
7. In Michigan, from Flint water, to Crime and Murder, to GM Ignition Switches, It’s a Culture of Death. It’s not just the water that was recklessly used to put people’s lives in jeopardy. There are many things that happen in Flint that would give one the impression that there is a low value placed on human life. Flint has one of the worst murder and crime rates in the country. Just for context, if New York City had the same murder rate as Flint, Michigan, the number of people murdered last year in New York would have been almost 4,000 people—instead of the actual 340 who were killed in NYC in 2015. But it’s not just street crime that makes one wonder about what is going on in Michigan. Last year, it was revealed that, once again, one of Detroit’s automakers had put profit ahead of people’s lives. General Motors learned that it had installed faulty ignition switches in many of its cars. Instead of simply fixing the problem, mid-management staff covered it up from the public. The auto industry has a history of weighing the costs of whether it’s cheaper to spend the money to fix the defect in millions of cars or to simply pay off a bunch of lawsuits filed by the victims surviving family members. Does a cynical, arrogant culture like this make it easy for a former corporate CEO, now governor, turn a blind eye to the lead that is discovered in a municipality’s drinking water?
8. Don’t Call It “Detroit Water”—It’s the Largest Source of Fresh Drinking Water in the World. The media keeps saying Flint was using “Detroit’s water.” It is only filtered and treated at the Detroit Water Plant. The water itself comes from Lake Huron, the third largest body of fresh water in the world. It is a glacial lake formed over 10,000 years ago during the last Ice Age and it is still fed by pure underground springs. Flint is geographically the last place on Earth where one should be drinking poisoned water.
9. ALL the Children Have Been Exposed, As Have All the Adults, Including Me. That’s just a fact. If you have been in Flint anytime from April 2014 to today, and you’ve drank the water, eaten food cooked with it, washed your clothes in it, taken a shower, brushed your teeth or eaten vegetables from someone’s garden, you’ve been exposed to and ingested its toxins. When the media says, “9,000 children under 6 have been exposed,” that means ALL the children have been exposed because the total number of people under the age of 6 in Flint is … 9,000! The media should just say, “all.” When they say “47 children have tested positive,” that’s just those who’ve drank the water in the last week or so. Lead enters the body and does it’s damage to the brain immediately. It doesn’t stay in the blood stream for longer than a few days and you can’t detect it after a month. So when you hear “47 children,” that’s just those with an exposure in the last 48 hours. It’s really everyone.
10. This Was Done, Like So Many Things These Days, So the Rich Could Get a Big Tax Break. When Gov. Snyder took office in 2011, one of the first things he did was to get a multi-billion dollar tax break passed by the Republican legislature for the wealthy and for corporations. But with less tax revenues, that meant he had to start cutting costs. So, many things—schools, pensions, welfare, safe drinking water—were slashed. Then he invoked an executive privilege to take over cities (all of them majority black) by firing the mayors and city councils whom the local people had elected, and installing his cronies to act as “dictators” over these cities. Their mission? Cut services to save money so he could give the rich even more breaks. That’s where the idea of switching Flint to river water came from. To save $15 million! It was easy. Suspend democracy. Cut taxes for the rich. Make the poor drink toxic river water. And everybody’s happy.
Except those who were poisoned in the process. All 102,000 of them. In the richest country in the world.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Technocapitalism: Bitcoin, Mars, and Dystopia w/Loretta Napoleoni
We are living through an incipient technological revolution. AI, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, commercial space travel, and other i...
-
Source: Caitlin's Newsletter One of the worst mistakes you can make when formulating your understanding of the world is to ...
-
Source: Common Dreams Two dogs walking. One of them says to the other: “I bark and I bark, but I never feel like ...
