Good News and Bad News

[RWalker]

"Progress is not a gift, but a victory. To make progress, man has to work, strive and toil, tame the elements, combat environment, recast institutions, subdue circumstances, and at all times be ideologically alert and awake." Kwame Nkrumah, Address to the National Assembly 6-12-65


The good and the bad news; the good news is that while everything falls apart around us we have inherent in our culture and cultural memory the key to preservation of our sanity. What do I mean? Let me give you an example. There is an article in the Washington Post about the fact that nearly 50 percent of the population in the US is mentally disturbed this is how one paper reported it:


"The United States leads in mental illness globally with 46 percent of Americans suffering mental disorders ranging from anxiety, depression to substance abuse in their lifetime, The Washington Post reported Tuesday."
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/20...nt_3056856.htm


The good news; is that so-called minority groups, people like you and I, and immigrants who live in neighborhoods were their culture is still alive do much better in maintaining their sanity. Here is how the Washington Post reported this fact:

"It is not clear why Americans have such high rates of mental illness, but cultural factors clearly play a role. Immigrants quickly increase their risk of mental health problems, especially if they do not live in native ethnic communities. Minorities also tend to have lower levels of mental health problems despite lower economic status, suggesting that the social support they provide each other is protective."
Study: U.S. Leads In Mental Illness, Lags in Treatment
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 7, 2005; Page A03

This is precisely why I wrote the novel "Paradise Chocolate Love," because I wanted to show the power of our cultural and community organized globally even in the face of the growing crisis of international capitalism and international capital. (By the way the novel was recently was honored with a Special Recognition award by the country's largest African book expo, the Los Angeles Black Book Exposition. We thank the brothers and sisters involved with that Expo for taking such a bold and welcome step.)

So it is clear that we have a dynamic and effective defensive (and dare we say it offensive weapon) against the insanity that is the US social economic system. A social economic system that Bill Moyers describes accurately in a DC speech this week. Unfortunately Moyers, an old line LBJ Democrat posits the solution as one of organizing people across the country to seize control of capitalism and make it work for all the people; and to make globalism a system with a conscience. I quote:

"Go home and tell the truth to your neighbors and fight
the corruption of the system. But it's not enough just to say
how bad the others are. You owe your opponents the compliment
of a good argument. Come up with fresh ideas to make capitalism
work for all. Ask entrepreneurs to join you - they know how to
make things happen. Show us a new vision of globalization with
a conscience. Stand up for working people and people in the
middle and people who can't stand on their own. Be not cowed,
intimidated, or frightened - you may be on the losing side of
the moment, as the early progressives were, but you're on the
winning side of history."

These things cannot happen, as capitalism has never and can never work for all the people. It by definition has to take labor from most of the people so the capitalist can amass unequal amounts, massive amounts of capital, failing to do would mean that it is not capitalism. No the best we can expect is that the small capitalists, and the middle to large capitalist might wake up and join the rest of us in opposition to the monopoly capitalists. After all monopoly capital is squeezing them also. Seizing their markets, running them out of business, and so forth. This unity of the rest of us along with the disaffect smaller segments of capital could be achieved, but it would take the leadership of a truly revolutionary agency to realize. I do not think people like Moyers are quite ready for that reality. Globalism, which is the polite name for imperialism, that is monopoly capital internationalized. Thus it can not have a conscience, since as it is nothing more than capitalism in its external guise and hence is only concerned with taking for the majority of the people of the world to make the big monopolist capitalist, those of the big financial and industrial and commercial capital centers, richer and more powerful than they were previously. This as Nkrumah points out is the dilemma of the liberal wing of the aggregated capitalist parties, such as the Democrats vis a vis the Republicans in the Democratic-Republican aggregate capitalist party, the Labour vis a vis the Conservatives in the UK and so on. They liberal wing wants to harken back to the welfare state, but the welfare state depends on super exploitation of the people outside of the welfare state country the super exploitation of Africa, Asia, Latin America and so forth; on the other hand if they embrace the naked line that is we too, just like our Republican or Conservative party brothers and sisters, are openly imperialist (global monopoly capitalists) and proud of it they would be only mimicking their electoral adversaries in the intra-capitalist-party contests. And that would mean most people who are against so naked criminality --which they know is their key constituencies--would desert them because they would be no different from the overtly imperialist wing. Those voting for and allied with the overt imperialist wing would have no reason to embrace these apparent "johnnies-come-lately". since they would prefer to remain loyal to those who advocated the position all along. Anyway have articulated my caveat this is part of what Moyers said:

"...begin with two families in Milwaukee. The breadwinners
in both households lost their jobs in that great wave
of downsizing in 1991 as corporations began moving jobs
out of the city and out of the country. In a series of
documentaries over the next decade my colleagues and I
chronicled their efforts to cope with the wrenching
changes in their lives and find a place for themselves
in the new global economy. I grew up with people like
them. They're the kind my mother called "the salt of the
earth" (takes one to know one!). They love their children,
care about their neighborhoods, go to church every Sunday,
and work hard all week. But like millions of Americans,
these two families in Milwaukee were playing by the rules
and still losing. By the end of the decade they were running
harder but slipping behind, and the gap between them and
prosperous America had reached Grand Canyon proportions."

"I want to show you a very brief excerpt from that first
documentary. It aired on PBS in January 1992 with the title
Minimum Wages: The New Economy. You'll see the father of one
family as he looks for work after losing his machinist's job
at the big manufacturer, Briggs and Stratton. You'll meet
his wife in their kitchen as they make a desperate call to
the bank that is threatening to foreclose on their home
after failing to meet their mortgage payments. During our
filming the fathers in both families became seriously ill.
One was hospitalized for two months, leaving the family
$30,000 in debt. You'll hear the second family talk about
what it's like when both parents lose their jobs, depriving
them of health insurance and putting their children's
education up for grabs."
... (video is played for the audience)
"Seeing those people again I thought of the interviews that
the Campaign for America's Future conducted around the country
on the eve of your conference. A woman in Columbus, Ohio, told
one interviewer something that I've heard in different ways in
my own reporting over the past few years. She said: "Everyday
life pulls families apart." It takes a moment for the
implications of that to hit home. Think about it: Our country,
the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the
race—a place where "everyday life pulls families apart.""

"What turns these personal traumas into a political travesty
is that the people we're talking about are deeply patriotic.
They love America. But they no longer believe they matter
to the people who run the country. When our film opens, they
are watching the inauguration of Bill Clinton on television
in 1992. By the end of the decade, when our final film in
the series aired, they were paying little attention to
politics; they simply didn't think their concerns would ever
be addressed by our governing elites. They are not cynical—
their religious faith leaves them little capacity for
cynicism—but they know the system is rigged against them.
As it is."

"You know the story: For years now a relatively small fraction
of American households have been garnering an extreme
concentration of wealth and income as large economic and
financial institutions obtained unprecedented levels of power
over daily life. In 1960 the gap in terms of wealth between
the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent was 30-fold. Four
decades later it is more than 75 fold. (See Joshua Holland,
AlterNet, posted 4/25/05 )

"Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue
if everyone were benefiting proportionally. But that's not
the case. Statistics tell the story...."

"While we've witnessed several periods of immense growth in
recent decades, the average real income of the bottom 90
percent of American taxpayers - that's a heap of people -
fell by 7 percent between 1973 and 2000. (ibid )"

"During 2004 and the first couple of months this year, wages
failed to keep pace with inflation for the first time since
the 1990 recession. They were up somewhat in April, but it
still means that "working Americans effectively took an
across-the-board pay cut at a time when the economy grew
by a healthy four percent and corporate profits hit record
highs as companies got more productivity out of workers
while keeping pay raises down." (ibid )

"Believe it or not, the United States now ranks the highest
among the highly developed countries in each of the seven
measures of inequality tracked by the index. While we enjoy
the second highest per capita GDP in the world (excluding
tiny Luxembourg), we rank dead last among the 20 most
developed countries in fighting poverty and we're off the
chart in terms of the number of Americans living on half
the median income or less. (ibid )

"And the outlook is for more of the same. On the eve of George
W. Bush's second inauguration The Economist - not exactly a
Marxist rag - produced a sobering analysis of what is
happening to the old notion that any American can get to the
top. With income inequality not seen since the first Gilded
Age (and this is The Economist editors speaking, not me) - with
"an education system increasingly stratified with fewer
resources than those of their richer contemporaries" and great
universities "increasingly reinforcing rather than reducing
these educational inequalities" - with corporate employees
finding it "harder…to start at the bottom and rise up the
company hierarchy by dint of hard work and self-improvement" -
"with the yawning gap between incomes at the top and bottom" -
the editors of The Economist - all friends of business and
advocates of capitalism and free markets—concluded that
"The United States risks calcifying into a European-style
class-based society."

"Let me run that by you again: "The United States risks
calcifying into a European-style class-based society."

"Or worse. The Wall Street Journal is no Marxist sheet, either,
although its editorial page can be just as rigid and dogmatic
as old Stalinists. The Journal's reporters, however, are among
the best in the country. They're devoted to getting as close
as possible to the verifiable truth and describing what they
find with the varnish off. Two weeks ago a front-page leader
in the Journal concluded that "As the gap between rich and
poor has widened since 1970, the odds that a child born in
poverty will climb to wealth - or that a rich child will fall
into middle class - remain stuck... Despite the widespread
belief that the U.S. remains a more mobile society than Europe,
economists and sociologists say that in recent decades the
typical child starting out in poverty in continental Europe
(or in Canada) has had a better chance at prosperity." (Wall
Street Journal, page one, 5/13/05)

"That knocks the American Dream flat on its back. But it should
put fire in our bellies. Because what's at stake is what it
means to be an American."

...
"Under a headline stretching six columns across the page, the
New York Times reported last year that tuition in the city's
elite private schools, kindergarten as well as high school,
would hit $26,000 for the coming school year. On the same page,
under a two-column headline, the Times reported on a school in
nearby Mount Vernon, just across the city line, with a student
body that is 97 percent black. It is the poorest school in the
town: Nine out of ten children qualify for free lunches; one
out of ten lives in a homeless shelter. During black history
month this past February a sixth-grader who wanted to write
a report on the poet Langston Hughes could not find a single
book about Hughes in the library - not one. .."

"How about this:"

"Caroline Payne's face and gums are distorted because her
Medicaid-financed dentures don't fit. Her appearance has caused
her to be continuously turned down for jobs. Caroline Payne is
one of the people in David Shipler's recent book, The Working
Poor: Invisible in America . She was born poor; although she
once owned her own home and earned a two-year college degree,
Caroline Payne has bounced from one poverty-wage job to another
all her life, equipped with the will to move up, but lacking
the resources to deal with such unexpected and overlapping
problems as a mentally handicapped daughter, a broken marriage,
and a sudden layoff that forced her to sell her few assets,
pull up roots, and move on. "In the house of the poor…" Shipler
writes, "the walls are thin and fragile, and troubles seep into
one another." If you believe the Declaration of Independence
means what it says - that all of us are endowed by the Creator
with a love of life, a longing for liberty, and a passion for
happiness - and everyone includes Caroline Payne - this is
something to get worked up about."

"Or this - courtesy of the columnist, Mark Shields. It seems
workers in the American territory of the Northern Mariana
Islands were being forced to labor under sweatshop conditions
producing garments for Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Gap and
Liz Claiborne. The garments were then shipped tariff-free and
quota-free to the American market where they were entitled
to display the coveted "Made in the USA" label. When Republican
Senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska heard that these people were
being paid barely half the U.S. minimum hourly wage and were
forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid shacks without
plumbing while working 12 hours a day, often seven days a week,
with none of the legal protections U.S. workers are guaranteed, he
became enraged. He got the Senate to pass a bill - unanimously -
that would extend the protection of our laws to the U.S. territory
of the Northern Marianas. But then the notorious lobbyist Jack
Abramoff moved into action with an SOS to his good friend, Tom
DeLay. The records show they met at least two dozen times. DeLay
traveled to the Marianas with his family and staff - on a
"scholarship" provided by Abramoff's clients where they played
golf and went snorkeling not far from the sweatshops (some
scholarship!). Was Tom DeLay offended by what he saw? To the
contrary. He told the Washington Post that the sweatshops were
"a perfect petri dish of capitalism." ABC News recorded him
praising Abramoff's clients by saying: "You are a shining light
for what is happening to the Republican Party, and you represent
everything that is good about what we are trying to do in
America and leading the world in the free-market system." And
Tom Delay - the rightwing radicals' revisionist incarnation of
Saint Francis of Assisi—killed the Senate bill. (Mark Shields,
CNN.com, 5/28/05)

"If that doesn't get your dander up, maybe this will: The minimum
wage hasn't been raised since 1997. After the Republicans recently
defeated an effort to increase it, Rick Wilson wrote for
CommonDreams.org about a single mother of two children working
somewhere in his home state of West Virginia at $5.15 an hour,
40 hours a week, or $5,378 below the federal poverty level of
$16,090 for a family that size. Put another way, "her earnings
only reach two-thirds of the poverty level." Meanwhile, the base
salary of the Members of Congress who voted down the wage increase
is $162,100. That single mom would have to work about 31,476 hours
to earn what those members of Congress get in a year. And remember —
the minimum wage she earns is actually worth less than it was 40
years ago. (Rick Wilson, CommonDreams.org, 5/25/05)
"

...
(speaking of Washington DC)
"This is an occupied city, a company
town, a wholly owned subsidiary of the powerful and privileged
whose have hired an influence racket to run it. The records are
so poorly kept it's impossible to know how many lobbyists there
really are in this town, but the Center for Public Integrity
found that their ranks include 240 former members of Congress
and heads of federal agencies and over 2000 senior officials
who passed through the revolving door of government at warp
speed. Lobbyists now spend $3 billion a year buying influence
and access for their clients and, according to the New York
Times, over the last six years spent more than twice the amount
spent by candidates for federal office. Once again this is
a divided city. Not between North and South as in Lincoln's
time, but between those who pay to play - those who can buy
the government they want—and those who can't even afford
even a seat in the bleachers."

"So it is that huge financial institutions like MBNA - the
credit card giant that is the biggest contributor to the
President's two campaigns for the White House - prevail in
getting Congress and George W. Bush to curtail personal
bankruptcies, making it harder for those families in Milwaukee
to get a fresh start and a second chance.

"So it is that Wal-Mart, with the third largest corporate
political action committee in the country, and pharmaceutical
giants with more lobbyists in town than there are Members of
Congress, join with gun manufacturers and asbestos makers and
the White House to restrict the right of aggrieved citizens
to take corporations to court for malfeasance.

"So it is that as ExxonMobil accumulates more than $1 billion
a month from escalating oil prices—more than $1 billion a month
even after allocating for dividends, share repurchases, and
capital spending - the oil and gas industry wrings huge tax
breaks from a public already squeezed hard by high prices at
the gas pumps.

"And so it is that on the Sunday before President Bush's second
inaugural, Nick Confessore, writing in the New York Times
Magazine, describes how the president's first round of tax cuts
has brought the United States tax code closer to a system under
which income from savings and investments would not be taxed
at all and revenues for public services would be raised
exclusively from taxes on working men and women. One of the most
fervent right-wing class warriors in Washington is quoted as
predicting: "No capital gains tax, no dividends tax. No estate
tax, no tax on interest." It will be one of President Bush's
enduring legacies to have replaced estate taxes on the wealthy
with a sweat tax on their grave diggers.

"Let me read you something:

"When political interests shower Washington with millions in
campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it's
ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price and most of them
never see it coming. This is what happens if you don't contribute
to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying. You pick up
a disproportionate share of America's tax bill. You pay higher
prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to
prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation
have been excused from paying. You're compelled to abide by laws
while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts
that you incur while others do not. You're barred from writing
off your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities
while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run
your business by one set of rules, while the government creates
another set for your competitors. In contrast the fortunate few
who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right
lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a
bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want
to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides
the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts,
the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity
from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to
ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government
gives its approval. If they want to kill legislation that is
intended for the public, it gets killed.

"Once again I'm not quoting Marx or Lenin or even The Nation,
the American Prospect, the Washington Monthly, In These Times,
The Progressive, or Mother Jones.

"I'm quoting from...Time . From the heart of the Time-Warner
empire comes the judgment that America now has "government for
the few at the expense of the many."

"You read this, and then you read the report by the American
Political Science Association which finds that "increasing
inequalities threaten the American ideal of equal citizenship
and that progress toward real democracy may have stalled in
this country and even reversed." You also read - in that same
report - that a quarter of all whites in this country have no
financial assets. Then you read on and learn that the median
white household has 62% more income and twelve times as much
wealth as the median black household and that 6l% of African-
Americans in this country and half of all Latinos have no
financial assets at all.

"Then you open Jared Diamond's new book, Collapse: How Societies
Choose to Succeed or Fail to find the Pulitzer Prize-winning
scholar's description of an America where rich elites cocoon
themselves "in gated communities, guarded by private security
guards, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend
on private pensions, and send their children to private schools."
Gradually, they lose the motivation "to support the police
force, the municipal water supply, Social Security, and public
schools." Any society where the elite insulate themselves from
the consequences of their action, Diamond warns, contains a
built-in blueprint for failure.

"You read all this and realize you have been seeing it with your
own eyes as a reporter in the field. You're seeing the mugging
of the American Dream right before your eyes."

...


"...Hal Crowther, who was at Time and Newsweek and the
Buffalo News before going his own way with an independent
column. Just this week he writes that "The first thing every
reporter was taught, back when reporters were taught things,
is that the best way to find the truth is to follow the money…
If the media still hunted with live ammunition, Enron,
Halliburton and the energy industry's pornographic profits
since 9/11 would be enough to force this oil-soaked, sheik-
beholden government to resign. In disgrace-remember disgrace?"
And he goes on: "Worse still than handouts to the wealthy
is the reprehensible new legislation that blocks working
Americans from climbing the hill where the money flows -
laws like boulders rolled downhill to crush the scrambling
underclass, the millions of Americans unable to pay their
bills. Think about what it means to limit personal
bankruptcies, inhibit class action suits against toxic
employers, protect chemical polluters (usually oil companies)
from liability lawsuits and cap settlements in personal
injury cases. It means trying to eliminate what little
protection ordinary citizens retain against corporate
leviathans that cheat, exploit, injure and poison them, trap
them in hopeless jobs, renege on their healthcare and default
on their pensions. It means striping leverage from the people
who have no leverage to spare.""

"Hal Crowther is one of those journalists who goes hunting
with live ammunition. But if Kenneth Tomlinson and Karl
Rove have their way, public broadcasting journalists will be
firing blanks.

"What's important in this story is not only that journalism
still matters - that reporting from the ground up can strike
a nerve in the heart of the imperium. What's important is
that you see what as citizens you are up against. These guys
play for keeps. They mean to control the story. And if they
can they will silence or discredit anyone who dissents from
the official view of reality.

"A profound transformation is occurring in America and those
responsible for it don't want you to connect the dots. We
are experiencing what has been described as a "fanatical
drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and
statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks
that have shaped public responsibility for social harms
arising from the excesses of private power." From public land
to water and other natural resources, from media with their
broadcast and digital spectrums to scientific discoveries and
medical breakthroughs, a broad range of America's public
resources is being shifted to the control of elites and the
benefit of the privileged. It all seems so clear now that we
wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time.
Back in the early 1970s President Nixon's Attorney General,
John Mitchell, predicted that "this country is going to go so
far to the right that you won't recognize it." A wealthy
right-winger of the time, William Simon, President Nixon's
Secretary of the Treasury, wrote a polemic declaring that
"funds generated by business…must rush by the multimillions"
to conservative causes. Said Business Week, bluntly: "Some
people will obviously have to do with less…It will be a bitter
pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less
so that big business can have more."

"We've seen the strategy play out for years now: to cut workforces
and wages, scour the globe in search of cheap labor, trash the
social contract and the safety net meant to protect people from
hardships beyond their control, make it hard for ordinary
citizens to gain redress for the malfeasance and malpractice of
corporations, and diminish the ability of government to check
and balance "the animal spirits" of economic warfare where the
winner takes all. Streams of money flowed into think tanks to
shape the agenda, media to promote it, and a political machine
to achieve it. What has happened to working Americans is not
the result of Adam Smith's benign and invisible hand but the
direct consequence of corporate money, ideological propaganda,
a partisan political religion, and a string of political
decisions favoring the interests of wealthy elites who bought
the political system right out from under us.

"It's an old story in America. We shouldn't be surprised by it
any more. Hold up a mirror to this moment and you will see
reflected back to you the first Gilded Age in the last part of
the 19th century. Then, as now, the great captains of industry
and finance could say, with Frederick Townsend Martin, "We are
rich. We own America. We got it, God knows how, but we intend
to keep it."

"They were deadly serious. Go for the evidence to such
magisterial studies of American history as Growth of the
American Republic (Morison, Commager, and Leuchtenberg), and
you'll read how they did it: They gained control of newspapers
and magazines. They subsidized candidates. They bought
legislation and even judicial decisions. To justify their
greed and power they drew on history, law, economics, and
religion to concoct a philosophy that would come to be known
as Social Darwinism - "


So in summation, I would like to suggest that the choices we have before us are stark we can either heed Cabral and "return to the source"; heed Seku Ture's call for us to embrace "a dialectical approach to culture"; heed Kwame Ture's admonition that we come to understand that culture is a liberating phenomena; or we can continue to suffer as international monopoly capitalism hurdles human society faster and faster towards devastation and something akin to our total destruction as a recognizable global human civilization.

as always I thank you for your time,


Roy Walker