Time for the Republic of New Africa?

  Scotland's independence seemed like a nearly irrelavant issue to me until one day I saw an article about how bad it might be. But as is typical of our 1984ish era the press prints the opposite of reality. "Bad" really meant better for a lot of people. RSBC and the banking class were threatening to leave Scotland if she left the UK. I immediately wondered what I could do to get big banks to threaten to leave Americans alone. I'm sure people would be happy to just hear the threat of no more foreclosures, banking bailouts, and back room deals that have hurt the middle class. If banks left us we could redistribute the 51 billion in annual profits from student loans the government and banks soak up while young adults live in their parents basements to the actual student debtors. We could stop finance for any more wars against people who pose no security threat. Not least of which is the war on us: we the American people living under constant security surveillance and the heel of a militarized police force that enforces revenue collection from the economically weakest citizens. The possibilities for life without the big bank cartel's influence are tantalizing. Banking itself is not the problem. Plenty of local credit unions and small banks actually do some good in the community. But unless you are of such high net worth you have a personal banker, the big banks are doing nothing good for you.

  Banks in the USA are part and parcel of an extreme casino economy. And like the fools they are, many Americans are lining up to lose their money at the slot machines and card tables. Wide eyed staring at the few who win big like Steve Jobs, they become convinced that if they just play hard and long enough, they too will one day be rich. They may indeed become insanely rich, with a life eased by an ever increasing supply of poor people willing to serve them for less and less money. But then again, most of them are more likely to become one of the servants. If they are very lucky. A high end nanny makes over 100,000$ a year with great benefits. Most pediatricians would be lucky to see that kind of money- and entire hospital floors of sick kids are much harder to care for than one or two rich brats. Who has the money for $100,000 a year nanny? Well exactly who you would expect in the casino economy: a few occasional winners, but mostly the guys who own and run the casino. The banking class is happy to see us come in and bet: they are making money off of our losses. 

 Some Americans want to risk it all for a potential reward. They want to risk even when there is no money to risk so they go in for loan after loan. Student loans beyond a certain point are the slot machine area of our new economy. Playing poker for a living is probably a more secure career track than some of what people get themselves into through higher education. Apparently no one tells the grad students that studying fascinating topics like the philology of Ladino or rural semiotics has them aiming for tenure with odds that make the craps table look good. If the banks are Vegas, the education system is Atlantic City: programming students in directions that lead most of them to loss, while a few will gain immense riches.  

 Americans on average can not be logical, and it would be foolish to expect their prudence. They seem to rather enjoy the miserable state they have placed themselves in. Just ask them about how much better it might be in a more socialistic country, and they will tell you how horrible it might be to pay higher taxes. If you mention that these taxes would let them live without fear that they are one illness away from bankruptcy and one job away from homelessness; they get confused and annoyed. They talk about fear of poverty as motivational and good, even if they are experiencing the misery of poverty themselves. 

 But there are groups of Americans who see clearly through the nonsense they have been fed.  They understand the tyranny of a big brother government run by the banking sector and a few wealthy entities. They understand that most of us, being average will be better off not suffering for the good of the 1%. These groups exist all over the country and are of every political and demographic color. Maybe we all just need to start planning to break away. As a black person, I'm part of one of the groups with the most to hate about the current state. We have a flag and an anthem...can a currency be far ahead? The government probably killed Chokwe Lumumba to stop it. Free the land! And let the big banking class and their corrupt federal government lackeys leave!

Police Brutality Against the Pregnant

The latest events in Sunset Park, another incident of NYPD brutality against a pregnant woman, are horrifying but not particularly surprising. Sunset Park is a working class immigrant Brooklyn neighborhood with a long history of trouble with the police.

El Grito de Sunset Park, a local group,  should be lauded for bringing such events to light. They are helping perform the real work police were supposed to do: protect us. On their facebook page where video of the assault was first posted there are a surprising  number of nasty comments from people with Anglo surnames. Such people wrote that such women as the pregnant woman pushed to the pavement are "idiots" and the local people 'lawless freeloaders' who should be arrested. Although the anonymous nature of the internet makes it impossible to know who these Facebook trolls are, the logical and probabalistic guess would be that they are members of the disgruntled white working class. By clicking the icon of one such  individual who criticized the beaten pregnant woman one can open a personal page with multiple posts about Nascar, the demographic defining hobby of the pale and penniless. It seems like the elites have trained part of the white working class to persecute and hate people like me, and not just the working class whites who sign up to become police officers.

Several versions of the news story include the detail that the woman has since bled from her vagina. I did not see the woman as a patient, but I would guess given the story she may have had a placental abruption. This detail was hidden from the press. It is too gruesome a reminder of how little respect the prevailing regime has for the lives of nonwhites.

An action is planned this Saturday in Sunset Park; see Facebook page for El Grito de Sunset Park for details on community actions.

People's Climate March Day Live: The Corporate Climate Crusade

One accidental keystroke and I deleted my brilliant blog which I wrote at 4AM about the climate march. I have not the time to write it all over. To summarize the march's psuedoanarchic structure led to a corporate take-over. When the money for ecological campaigning comes from players like BP, Dow Chemicals and Goldman Sachs we are all in trouble because the good will of many people has been hijacked by the system they are fighting against.

I spoke to a community organizer from a nearby area of the Bronx Mr. Raphael Schweizer. He believed the march to represent a "grassroots movement." Perhaps it does. But the march seems too organized and too mainstream. On the other hand the companies that sponsored the organizing for the march may have shot themselves in the foot. The march looked powerful. People were organized...and when more radical and realistic conversations take place, there may be more room for them.

I came into Manhattan for other reasons, and accidentally crossed the march. I'll share the ultimate in postmodern corporate nonsensical imaging I captured: the marchers could see themselves projected onto a screen.

Occupy Ends in a Lie

Yesterday, I eagerly went down to Zuchotti Park for an Alternative Media event that never happened. There were some alternative media players around. I spent some time speaking to Luke Rudkowski. I heard there were some other alternative journalists around. But the organizer of the event was nowhere to be found. Rumor has it he overslept...just couldn't get out of bed, a sad example of a problem that plagues many leftist groups: organizers who can not organize even their own lives.

So to a noticeably small crowd many people spoke and showed various messages. Probably the most lunatic man, not really part of the group, held a sign stating that Jews run the World. When people stopped to argue an Occupy organizer  tried to move him away and began arguing with him. "It's not just the Jews" the organizer stated...as a Jew I began to feel slightly uncomfortable at the implication. Who did these more moderate people think ran things then? Us and our cronies reading from a copy of the obviously-fake-but-never-quite-disproved-in-the-eyes-of-antisemites The Elders of Zion? I didn't want to find out what the answer was so I moved away towards the center of the action.

At the center individuals stood up to lecture a crowd stopping after every string of words to have the whole group repeat. The man in the center of the group would say something like 'climate change is the worst problem facing humanity' and the entire group would repeat. This happened over and over for every sentence he spoke. Were it not for a high percent of the crowd being dressed like schizophrenic homeless people, and the obviously left wing politics, I felt I could have been at a Christian prayer meeting. Or a part of a Reform Jewish Yom Kippur service for that matter. Just one that seemed to be lasting for an eternity. But instead of some admitting to personal sins we were covering the sins of the current regime. To anyone who even follows alternative media the problems of the current system are all old news; the question which remained unanswered was what anyone was going to do in terms documenting it innovative ways that inspire actions. But there was in fact no teaching about how to produce media in any organized fashion that I saw.

Given my distaste for what felt like a Church-of-leftists event, I wandered to the edges and struck up a conversation with Like Rudkowski. Eventually we joined the group in marching down towards Wall Street's famous bull statue which was jealously guarded by a team of police officers.

The officers walked around, chests forward in something that easily could have been mistaken for a performance artwork about state power and capitalism. What exactly was so controversial about people getting near the statue I don't know; but it required an entire group of officers to stop it. It was an ironic display at best considering how many massive financial crimes go on inside the banks and investment firms as opposed to outside of them on nearby public sidewalks.

And there lies the problem: Occupy has plenty to fight, but apparently not a lot of "fight" left in it's collective soul. On my way home I passed by Zuchotti park and at that point the most organized group were an apparent off-shoot called Occupy Weed Street. I promptly left. Watching young people extolling the supposed virtues of marijuana to a group of people too disorganized to have an event they planned for reasons including organizers not getting out of bed was too much for me. Years ago when I asked my better heeled friends and family what Occupy was, they all had one answer: "crazy people." Whatever Occupy once was, it seemed to be headed in the direction of lunacy with drugs, hot pink hair dye, and grungy black clothing for people who were clearly not rock stars included.

I woke up this morning and checked the Occupy website to see how they perceived themselves...and what do you know? An article on the success of the alternative media event trumpeted the success of the event before it happened; in spite of the fact that it never actually did. The event was a sad example of why the current alternative media can not "replace mainstream media" as it's author posits it does. The publication of the article was a sad excuse for journalism: something like a public relations fluff piece that got published instead of an investigative piece: exactly what alternative media complains about all the time. So, no matter what else I get a chance to read, I'm going with what I saw with my own eyes: the demise of a potential mass movement. In one hopeful note, some spin off groups continue forward confronting the new financialized version of the capitalist system at two of it's weakest points: debt and fraud. So perhaps yesterdays events were about the cycle of the life of a movement: out with Occupy, and in with Occupy the SEC, Strike Debt, and of course a few real alternative media outlets.

Children, Young Families and Debt: Part I: Introduction

Over the past months I have extensively researched the topic of children and debt. I have a tremendous personal interest in the topic. I was a childhood debtor myself. Although I initially resisted, my mother persuaded me to take on debt as a 14 year old to attend a private school. The violence and low standards of my local public school district had persuaded her; and she was at least equally persuasive with me. I'm not sure, but I don't think she could have taken the loan instead of me. My prep school, in spite of having an endowment larger than some colleges, had a policy of making it's financial aid students take loans. My experience highlights one of the worst aspects of childhood debt; it throws into sharp relief the often incorrect assumptions that polite moneyed people make about the idea of debt and choice.

Those with the largest array of choices in almost every situation of childhood and young family debt that I found were the creditors, not the debtors. The creditors were often not just huge transnational corporations but people living in the same communities as the debtors. But the creditors had chosen to indoctrinate children into financial debt as a way of life. This 'financialized' debt is very different from the debts that binds a healthy community. In many healthy communities, most people "owe" everyone something. Favors are extended, and an inherent social contract implies that they will be returned if needed. The capitalist market does not reign supreme over every single aspect of life, and some exchanges happen without the exchange of cash. But the kind of debt children are in many cases being indoctrinated towards, or even directly put into, does not tie communities together; it breaks them apart person by person and family by family.

I set out to research the topic of childhood debt and I found many deficits in knowledge that I hope will one day be examined. For example in my own field, medicine, we know that, unfortunately, poverty is a risk factor for child abuse. While there are wealthy people who abuse their children, statistically speaking, the poor are more likely to beat their kids. The mechanism is that poor families go through more crises and more stressors, and something about these conditions make parents more likely to "snap" and start beating up their kids. Obviously, many poor parents are extremely dedicated good parents, but we serve the interests of no one to put our head in the sand about this important correlation, or whether there might be an even stronger correlation with debt. Over past years as the economies of many countries have turned sour, the evidence of this correlation of poverty and child abuse continues to mount. This correlation is just one of many ways in which the health status of children is effected by the economic well-being of their family. Unfortunately, there is very little research on the effects of familial and personal debt on children. The one shining positive exception was the case of human trafficking debt bondage and children, in which academic work has identified the positive role healthcare providers can play. But even on this topic it is well aknowledged there is not enough academic research ( important article = Siva N. Stopping traffic. Lancet. 2010 Dec 18;376(9758):2057–8. [PubMed]) .

Some charity and civil society groups have produced research on childhood debt. The US lags behind in civil society examination of childhood debt; but not for lack of childhood debtors or children effected by debt. One does not even need to personally be a childhood debtor to be influenced by the trends of debt. Millions of children are living in indebted families. Millions more are living in a culture that misrepresents debt to it's most vulnerable members. In a report entitled The Debt Trap, issued by The Children's Society in the UK, the majority of UK children over 10 surveyed reported seeing advertising for loans "often" or "all the time." Other research by different groups reveals the reach of lender's advertisers goes even younger. In the UK, members of civil society have called for banning Payday loan lending from children's TV and programming. Which of course begs the question: why on earth do payday lenders advertise on children's TV to begin with? One reason is that advertisers are keenly aware of marketing research which shows we are more likely to use products introduced to us in our childhoods.

The types of childhood debtors I found over the course of my research were very diverse, but all of them were being indoctrinated to view debt as normative if not positive. This trend is not out of line with the mainstream culture. Although any pediatrician could tell you that exposing children to too much media and television is not good for them, overall the media consumption of children continues to rise. I suspect that even if there was no advertising for loans on television, the constant exposure to American media could drive young adults into a debtor lifestyle by normalizing extravagant consumption with no apparent consequences. But worsening the damage are advertisements which distort the reality of debt aired constantly. I fear the results will be like those I experienced as a debtor who began in childhood. Debt becomes normalized as the only way of life one knows. Indeed, I found that even I, though I had sympathy for childhood debtors and children impacted by family debt, also had a certain level of desensitization towards their situation.

So-called backwards societies find all kinds of ways to make families and children financially viable; yet in the advanced West we seem to be doing the opposite. As the economic situation of many people here worsens, it is really up to us to find a way to not drive our children into the debt based lifestyle we now understand to be so harmful from personal experience in many cases.

Why They Look Away. Why We Can Not, Part III

A recent incident typifies the problem. Wealthy donors raised money for a cause that could benefit themselves while hurting and harassing those who actually sought to change the landscape towards justice:

http://www.popularresistance.org/traumacenternow-activists-disrupt-luxury-uofc-fundraiser/

The message of academic medical centers that invest in huge research towers to capture grant money from NIH and the pharm industry while nearby populations get hurled into a population health status worse than that of sub-saharan Africa is clear...wealthy white America does not care about black or brown life. I'll write it again, because this is the very core of the issue: wealthy white America does not care about black or brown life, in any positive way.
If anything, wealthy white America is doing it's best to quietly prematurely erase black and brown lives; and this is no hyperbole. The kind of reproductive health pushed on low income black areas in combination of the lack of care about nearly anything else is literally eugenic.

Perhaps it is best if wealthy white Americans concern themselves fully with climate change...if it means they will start at least leaving us alone.

Why They Look Away, Why We Can't, Part II

And now I interrupt my regularly scheduled blogging to bring you breaking news of ...more of the same. Police brutality against young black and Latino people. It happens every day...

http://7online.com/news/exclusive-bronx-man-claims-police-brutality-caught-on-camera/296032/

Let us assume the worst of this man for the case of an intellectual exercise. Let us assume he is a criminal guilty of the most heinous crimes....as it so happens even those people are supposed to be prosecuted in an orderly and fair manner: we are supposed to have the rule of law.

Some reports state that the state has dropped all the charges filed against this youth after the youth was beaten up. How generous!

Why They Look Away, Why We Can't, Part I

I recently corresponded with an American academic. He was spending his summer in South America working on issues of climate change. He imagined himself to be at the forefront of an anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle. Perhaps on the surface he was. It's a safe bet that dirt poor farmers will be hit by the misery of climate change well before the effects ripple outward towards the emerging global middle class. But the ubiquitous nature of American academics reaching out to the world, as their own country falls apart in front of them bears examination.

Academics who participate in such behavior have several excuses that become less valid on examination- a skill that paradoxically many in academia lack. The first excuse is that poverty in the first world and the US is unlike the poverty in the third world. This assumption is less and less true every day if it ever was. Just go ask someone in Detroit living without water. Just go ask an undocumented worker American trying to get decent health care. Just go ask anyone in the black community about their relationship to the state.

The issues of the black community serve as good example of how third world the US of America is. At present the wealthy divide between black and white America surpasses that of the wealth divide between whites and blacks in South African at the height of Apartheid. People living on less than 2$ a day? Yeah, we have that too....in fact if non-white USA were a nation, we would probably have more people living on 2$ a day or less than the Palestinians. Think about that the next time you hear about the oppression of the Palestinian people. All in all, it isn't clear that the Palestinians aren't getting a somewhat better deal than blacks in America. And, no, I'm not referring to the 5 or so extended clans of uber-rich politically connected Palestinians in Ramallah or Haifa. I'm talking about your average Joes, Joses, Jamals and Muhhameds. Ultimately, these things are always individual, but sadly some people on either side of this comparison pay the most extreme prices. State sponsored violence has a noted tendency to cut the lives of the young men of both communities. But if we are to weigh all lives equally, the comparison is stark: Matti Fiedman pointed out that " In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives—that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago" in an article examining the enlightened world's hostile fixation on the problems of Israel. 

Still, the eyes of America's academic class, a community which heavily overlaps with the wealthier classes, look outward. They look away from a brewing mess of oppression at home, to study problems abroad. Unfortunately, their efforts may be largely futile until inequality at home is addressed. The politically palatable solution to American poverty is never redistribution, but exploitation, externalization, and neocolonialism. At it's extreme this philosophy becomes absurd: everyone should enjoy equally in exploiting the environment and other people- which is absurd because because eventually you run out of environment and other people to exploit. To see a  concrete example simply examine the "struggle" of upper class women in America to self actualize, and how it has been aided by numerous poorer women who have taken over the tasks they found beneath them right down to even carrying their babies as surrogates. To be fair the US is not the only country with an expansion of equality by exploitation model. The shifting unclear borders of the middle east often have to do with a political calculation about housing- i.e. even the poor can have a house, if we only take someone else's land and appropriate it to ourselves. Somehow this calculation is more politically palatable than just taking some houses from the rich; so unfortunately, the numerous outward facing academics who ponder problems of people they have never met may be simply wasting their time except assuring themselves the mental health value of self congratulatory feelings of beneficence. If anything they bring a certain level of malignancy to the world stage for reasons too numerous to cover in one blog post.

The question remains: why? Why would intelligent people choose to ignore malnourished children 20 miles from them to worry about malnourished children in places they can not even pronounce. Perhaps it is due to the same psychological mechanism that keeps the rich concerned with certain bird species. Taking a real concern about the immediate community would require that such people look in the mirror, and examine their own very real contributions to inequality and misery. Who prepares their food, takes care of their children, takes care of their parents, and in short makes their very lives livable- and how do they treat and compensate them? Millions of angry health care and food workers already know the answer too well. Let alone the small army of impoverished workers academics have created such as certain adjuncts (the ones who lack rich husbands or fathers) sharing the same buildings with them, trying to exist and raise children on insecure, poverty level compensation.

Academia's Poverty Professionals

Misery seems to be the ultimate growth industry everywhere I go. From the war tired areas of the middle east to the post industrial former factory towns of the mid-west. There have always been profiteers of poverty, but lately pretending to care about the poor has also become it's own industry.

Poverty's new profiteers are not neo-slave dealers, rather faux abolitionists claiming they desire to free the poor. Like many ridiculous groups, their nexus is at the top of the Ivory tower. American academia pays most of it's workers poverty wages, but not to worry, there is a new crop of academics to raise consciousness about those suffering from low wages. UNC Law Professor Gene Nichol runs the “Poverty Center” at the school for more than $200k each year. U. C. Berkley pays Robert Reich 240,000$ to teach a single class on income inequality. In his defense perhaps receiving such a large paycheck for such little labor while his coworkers, adjunct professors, make about 10% of his salary for 500% of his workload makes him an expert in the creation of inequality. Nonetheless, something quite unfortunate is happening as Universities invest in such inequality leadership. Those of us at the bottom of the pyramid are being led by the metaphorically blind.

People who make six figure base salaries with additional benefits worth more,  can not comprehend the world of most Americans in 2014. I have experienced such social-reality-blindness firsthand amongst members of the medical profession. A few years ago when an incompetent doctor lost a test result of mine, a colleague could not understand why I had a problem. "It only costs $1000 for the test...just go get another one" he advised me. I guess medical school did not put people into six figures of debt back when he finished. I wish I could say he was an isolated example, but he is the norm. The wealthy have become a different species. Asking the rich to produce important work in poverty is akin to asking men to describe the process of giving birth from a personal perspective. It simply doesn't make sense. Yet the rich are the self appointed leaders of most organizations working against poverty.

I personally see the dismal outcome of such well heeled leadership in my own involvement in civil society. Nothing made me think the fight against student debt peonage was more hopeless than a moment when I saw an older Professor tell young students that debt refusal would have no real consequences for them. Obviously, the man hadn't looked for a job in the last quarter century, or he would have realized that at present debt refusal is financial suicide.

I believe at some point a reversal will come over the situation before us. Sheer population numbers will push the wealthy into a new social role; and that role will not include robbing the taxpayer blind pretending to care about poverty. Until then, I believe one of the best thing we can do is amp up the social disdain for such hypocrites. We don't need leaders and scholars of poverty and inequality who do nothing but perpetuate it.