Empire & Inequality

Grinning, Parasitic Bastards: Class Notes From Chicago

In my last posting I referred to the employer class as “vicious, blood-sucking parasites.”

I know, I’m not supposed to talk like that. I’m supposed to talk like the writers over at the weekly Crain’s Chicago Business, which provides business news for and by the business class.

On page 15 of the latest Crain’s Chicago Business, there’s a story about what some in the business community are now referring to as “the wage-gap.” The story gives the compensation of the Chicago area’s highest paid CEOs. At the top of the list there’s Bank One’s Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon, whose tireless labors were rewarded to the tune of $26.8 million in salary, bonus, and stock incentives. Excellent. According to Crain’s, “that’s about 600 times the average annual salary of a white collar worker in the U.S. – $43, 878 – based on the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Bank One refused to estimate what its average employee earns.”

Mandatory Proletarianization and United States Health Insurance: Notes From an Overworked American

Here are some reflections on what happens when a wealthy “modern” society can’t get it together to offers its people universal public health insurance.

Everybody on the left knows about the astonishing number of Americans – 42 million, including millions of “working poor” (whose existence violates a core promise of the American Dream: work and you shall be rewarded with the means to support yourself and your family) – who lack health coverage in “the world’s richest nation.”

That number is shameful. So is the well known and widely loathed determination of tyrannical insurance corporations to limit the spectrum of health care services available to Americans in accordance with bottom-line profit “requirements.” We can all tell some of the resulting horror stories.

"A Line of Grinning [Australian] Police"

I received an interesting response to my last blog entry ("Smiling Liberal Faces") from Douglas Hawthorne of Australia. After regaling me with an interesting Jewish parable that matched (I think) the argument I made about racism in that entry, Mr. Hawthorne made an intriguing comment on the (I think) understandable preference of many people to forget terrible historical experiences of discrimination and oppression. After I related an example of such understandable forgetting in East St. Louis, Illinois, Douglas wrote back with some chilling narration and reflection on a recent fatal racist incident and its aftermath in Australia. He has interesting and eloquent things to say (sounding a bit like Jonathan Kozol, which is a wonderful thing in my opinion) on white liberal privilege and the need to give that privilege away "so that the children might live."

Smiling Liberal Faces

In my experience, it’s the self-described “liberals” who will drive you the craziest of all when you are trying to have a reasonable dialogue about questions of power, politics, and policy. In debating racism, for example, it’s far better – I find – to have to talk to a flat-out bigot who is open in his disdain for African-Americans or Latinos (or fill in the blank) than to be subjected to the sweet rhetoric of a “liberal” urban social worker or school administrator who claims to be deeply concerned for inner-city children and parents but doesn’t believe that those children or parents are personally and culturally capable of engaging in democracy or worthy of meaningful public investment in their communities.

Reader Reflections on Race, Gender, Cattle, and Rumsfeld's Rape Rooms

Last week I did a piece for ZNet called "Predictable Prison Atrocities" (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID;=5481).
[Ok, pretty soon I'll go back and read up on how to do that link thing like a real blogger]. The basic thesis of this piece was that there's nothing surprising about the sickening revelations --- particuarly the psycho-sexual "abuse" (really torture...see below) inflicted on Iraqi men at Abu Ghraib prison --- coming out of Iraq given four things: (1) the state of U.S. miitary intelligence (which calculates that such torture is especially effective in "interrogating" Arab men); (2) the terrible record of America's notorious racist mass incarceration holding pens, which currently hold two million very disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and male, and where male-on-male rape is all too common; (3) the noxious racism, sexism, sadism, and homophobia that is so endemic in the perverse mass culture that U.S. corporate media creates for the pacification of the non-elite populace (the people known as "the proles" in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four), which predominates (of course) in the armed forces; (4) the exremist neo-liberal determination of Rumsfeld and his cohorts to invade and occupy Iraq on the cheap. This article (the best thing is to read it and it's short) elicited three exceptional comments that I reproduce below. In the first comment, fellow Chicagoan Kamilah Foreman makes a number of rich connections on race, gender/misogyny/heterosexual privilege, violence, the Other, empire, and inequality. She is just as disgusted by the humilation of black men that goes in Chicago police jails as by the humiliation that has occurred in Iraq. In the second an observant and reflective professional from the Netherlands notes that US prison conduct in Iraq ought to be called "torture" and "atocity," not just "abuse." He also makes a cattle connection I did not know about and notes the obsession of mainstream commentary on Rumsfeld's rape rooms with stating that America's basic intent and conduct is basically noble and good. In the third and last comment, a comrade from Poland makes connections with American lynching history and the blood-soaked work history of the next imperial Viceroy in Iraq, the revolting John Negroponte. Again I feel fortunate to be in touch with ZNet's thoughtful and global readers, who remind me that I am a world citizen and that the only reference group that matters is humanity.

The "Schedule for Correction of Grievances"

STILL SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the famous Brown v. Board of Education decision (issued on May 17th, 1954), I have been reflecting on America’s persistently segregated and unequal schools. Up until Brown, the standard justification for black-white school segregation held that black schools were “separate but equal,” to use the Supreme Court’s language in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. That justification was a terrible joke. The black schools of Jim Crow America were miserably inferior in quality and funding.

Thinking About Thought Control II

Here is the second and last (fairly big entry) paste-in of selected interesting global, national, and local correspondendence I got on the "Thought Control" article. For background and context see the last posting ("Thinking About Thought Control"). If you have time, you can also look at the original article that sparked the response..the link is in the previous blog post.

Thinking About Thought Control

I recently did a ZNet piece titled “Thought Control” (http://zmag.org/content/s howarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID;=5410) that elicited a significant amount of thoughtful response, the largest amount in some time. Evidently the issue of corporate-state propaganda and thought control resonates richly with ZNet’s intelligent readership.

This and my next one (or two) posting(s) on "Empire and Inequality" will give space to some of this response, which will be followed by my own commentary.

I'm pretty impressed by a lot of the people I hear from...struck by the sharp relevance and intensity of their commentary, so much better than the endless know-it-all drivel I used to be surrounded by during my long lost days in and around U.S. academia.

Dark Connections: "Exporting America's Shame"

People who read my stuff with any regularity know that I talk quite a bit about dark and rich interconnections between U.S. domestic and U.S. foreign policy.

I was initially tempted to use the blog name “Empire Abroad, Inequality (and Repression) at Home," but that doesn't quite do the interconnectivity of it all justice since there is massive inequality (and repression) abroad and (perhaps less obvious but very real) empire at home. Hence: "Empire and Inequality.” "Repression" is gone for the sake of brevity, but lurks in the background and across both halves of the equation.

My writing often holds America’s domestic society up to an unflattering mirror, questioning our “leaders’” qualifications to lecture the rest of the world about “democracy,” “freedom,” and general societal health either before or after 9/11. Noting such disturbing facts as America’s astoundingly high incarceration rate -- which is unmatched anywhere in the world and incredibly racially disparate (blacks make up nearly half of United States' 2 million prisoners but 12 percent of total US population [free and unfree])-- I often mock and deconstruct the narcissistic nationalism American political and intellectual authorities. That national narcissism/"American exceptionalism" is epitomized by Texas Senator Fay Bailey Hutchinson’s claim, made in October 2002, that the United States is a special, God- and/or History-ordained “beacon to the world of the way life should be"...

Let Them Choke on Their "Cakewalk" Now

Thanks to eagle-eyed Ed Brolin, who caught some errors at the end of my recent ZNet essay "Let Them Eat Cakewalk" (which got a lot of response). Here's a corrected version for the record. This is an essay short enough to include in a single blog entry perhaps. Please do not read it as an advertisement for Kerry, whose performance to date is abysmal in my opinion...

Let Them Eat "Cakewalk"

ZNet May 5, 2004

Reflect for a moment on the one hundred and thirty-seven United States troops who died in Iraq during the second April of America's occupation. Their faces are available for your review on the front page of last weekend's USA Today. They are part of the largest one-month American GI body count since the beginning of the war. And the U.S. death toll is mounting at a rapid pace into May.

May Day 2004

One year ago to the day, our dangerously stupid Christian Fundamentalist rich boy president George W. Bush celebrated May Day – originally launched to celebrate the struggle of the international working class – by landing on an aircraft carrier to proclaim America’s “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. The president’s approval ratings were high and most of the United States population seemed to support his decision to invade and occupy that poor and impoverished nation in the name of the “war on terrorism.” It seemed possible to many that Bush was going to achieve the fast, cheap, and easy imperial victory that his audacious neo-conservative team of officers and advisers (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condaleeza Rice and others) had promised him. The Great Iraq gambit was paying off and some thought that the potency of the National Security Strategy/Bush Doctrine – a grand imperial strategy based on America’s ability to rule the world through sheer military might – was being demonstrated for all to see.