A Corporate Thanksgiving

As reported in the NYTimes corporate profits for the last fiscal quarter were the highest (before factoring in inflation) in U.S. history. While America's workers see their future crumble under the weight of joblessness and debt, the lords of Wall Street can hardly contain their glee. As the WSJ coyly describes it: the record bonuses being lavished on managers demonstrate Wall Street's "knack for finding a way to churn out profits and prop up pay levels despite uneasy markets, mounting regulation and mistrust by many Americans."

In the past when we spoke of two Americas the discussion centered on race and its intersection with poverty. No more. America's chickens or should I say turkeys have finally come home to roost. Having worked tirelessly since the end of post Civil War Reconstruction to keep black, white and brown labor at each others' throats our scions of Wall Street are callously setting about destroying what remains of the country's middle-class. We are evolving towards a system where the corporation replaces the old plantation: the haves get to govern as barons and the slaves are forever the have-nots.

Roasting the Middle Class Goose

The top 1 percent has been able to see their incomes rise almost twenty-fold over the past thirty years by playing each class of worker against the other, all with the encouragement of our own government. As a result we have the unconscionable spectacle of U.S. banks using taxpayer money to pay themselves massive bonuses while laying off American workers to hire temporary foreign replacements on the cheap.

"An investigation by the Associated Press revealed that major U.S. banks brought in foreign workers for high paying jobs while laying off American workers at the same time. The investigation revealed that a dozen banks requested visas for 21,800 foreign workers over a six-year span."--

(Now picture 21,800 mortgages sliced and diced and parceled out into Collateral Debt Obligations going belly-up. That's what our grifter class declares as smart money.)

As for those good blue collar jobs, thanks to his manipulated failure to make common cause with the black brown and red, the pale working stiff is getting the same shaft his "white trash' ancestors did when their wages were kept meager because of slavery.

In her excellent book "The New Jim Crow" Michelle Alexander explains how thanks to the policies of the government elite African Americans have been systematically kept apart and economically weak. She describes how the so-called 'War on Drugs' replaced the insidious control of race segregation. But the benefit of mass incarceration of the dark-skinned working poor goes even further towards enriching the investor class.

"The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners' work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself," says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being "an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps."

The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. "This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors."

As the writer sums up in El Diario-La Prensa: the rich have a lot to be thankful for. Thanks to prison labor, the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work designed for Third World labor. Now we know why Wall Street is so content to sell out the country and give us the bird.

The Left Didn't just Fail, It Was Slaughtered

In my previous post I alluded to the specter lurking in Chris Hedges' article, 'the "Phantom Left'. In his follow-up, 'A Recipe for Fascism' , he again disdains the 'liberal class' but while America's bourgeoisie surely deserve his scorn, his assertion that 'a disenfranchised and angry underclass is being encouraged to lash out at the bankrupt liberal institutions and the government that once protected them' is both faulty analysis and a distortion of history. The hopes of the underclass have never figured in our political thinking.

Thanks to racism and mass immigration the socialist movement that transfigured Europe and inspired Africa and Asia never took root in America. The influx of poor Eastern Europeans coupled with the Great Northern Migration of the recently freed slaves was considered a threat by the lily-white unions. So while it is true that groups like the Wobblies and the Congress of Industrial Workers managed to diffuse some of the fear by showing that united, women and ethnic minorities could extract concessions America's labor force remained largely segregated and hopelessly divided.

As an English visitor observed in the years before WWI: "menial work is increasingly felt to be beneath the dignity of the free white American. The intelligent, highly paid American is actually in the position of a ruling class. He is served and attended by negroes and alien immigrants very much as the ancient Athenian was served by a Thracian or an Asiatic."

It is this privileged status that the globalization that began after WWII has been steadily turning on its head.

The 'Problem is the Blacks'

On Monday, April 28, 1969, Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman noted in the White House diary: "President emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this, while not appearing to. Problem with overall welfare plan is that it forces poor Whites into same position as Blacks. Feels we have to get rid of the veil of hypocrisy and guilt and face reality."

The reality that the Nixon Government faced was how to manage white resentment as they saw their privileged status collapse in the face of Asian competition. Nixon had hoped to find a latter day Booker T Washington willing to temper black ambitions and accommodate negro subservience. Unfortunately for the Nixon Republicans and the capitalist power structure the 1960's press for equal rights made finding such a leader all but impossible. As Haldeman wrote:
"[the President] broods frequently over problems of how we communicate with the young and Blacks. It's really not possible except with Uncle Toms and we should work on them and forget militants."

The American system's solution to its middle-class problem developed on the tactics employed in the 1950's to discredit the Socialists and and destroy the Communist party. The War on America's emerging democracy otherwise known as Cointelpro was replaced by 'the War on Drugs'. By flooding black neighborhoods with illegal drugs and then issuing Draconian sentences for minor offenses the petty bourgeoisie was able to protect its endangered status and the politicians indebted to big business had fewer unhappy voters to try and content. That a Democratic president, William Jefferson Clinton, would merge the strands and expand the practice speaks volumes about 'liberal policies and their commitment to the poor.

When Clinton entered office, the entire prison population-local, state and federal-was just over a million. By the time he left it had doubled to over 2 million, the highest rate of incarceration and highest total of prisoners held in a democratic state in the history of the world.

60% of those federal inmates were in prison for nonviolent drug offenses. For the beleaguered white middle class it meant the boon of hundreds of new prisons, police weapons and corrections officers. A system grown so large that like our predatory banks it is now "Too Big to Fail". The largest public construction since the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s, the prison industrial complex helped expand the bubble once revered as the 'Great Clinton Economy'. It was a cynical strategy drawn from a reactionary tactic but brilliantly devised: 'Increase incarceration by nearly a million, add a couple of million workers to create and maintain a sprawling prison infrastructure, and voila! Lower unemployment and a healthier economy.'

Unfortunately for Barack Obama, the cost of the scam has now come due and middle class anger or not, he has no such option.

Wasted In America

Whether from a nagging inferiority complex attributable to its youth and borrowed cultures, or simply the fruit of its puritanical roots the USA has a self-destructive streak that is fast becoming its undoing. No nation can long survive unless it can instill a healthy amount of pride and a sense of shared commitment in its people. What was so poignant about Barack Obama's election was the tearful joy on the faces of our African-American children who appeared to range in age from five to over a hundred. Finally, they thought, their parents, those already dead or very much alive, could believe they were equal American members, allowed to indulge in all the prerequisites and privileges of their powerful country. An inspiring notion, to which we grown-ups are yet to be impressed.

With all the talk centered on rescuing the economy and ending the Iraq fiasco the giant elephant in the room, the great all-devouring threat to the nation's survival stands quiet and unseen. I'm referring to the criminal number of black and brown and native-born Americans being locked in prison and being robbed of constructive futures simply for getting involved with unsanctioned drugs.

There is something ethically grotesque about the fact that our last three presidents--Clinton, Bush and Obama--had all at one time in their youthful lives experimented with illegal drugs. Yet, since the election of Ronald Reagan the United States has incarcerated more American citizens for abusing marijuana than the total number of prisoners we had locked behind bars in 1980. (Of the 450,000 arrests during the period 1990-2002, 82% of the increase was for marijuana, with 79% for marijuana possession-- Boyum and Reuter, 2005).

As a result of these Draconian drug laws the United States has well over two million of its people in prison, the majority for non-violent drug offenses. America has the highest incarceration rate in the world and yet retains one of the highest rankings in drug abuse. More troubling still is the rate at which we are imprisoning women, many with small children, virtually guaranteeing that the family will not escape its downward spiral, their lives given over to the hedge of self-medication against hopelessness and chronic depression.

"There is considerable evidence to show that the costs of such laws do not fall equally across all segments of US society. Between 1985 and 1995, for instance, there was an increase of 200 percent in the number of females incarcerated in state and federal institutions, most for non-violent offences. Many commentators agree that much of this was the result of stricter enforcement,increased penalties and mandatory prison sentences for drug offenders" (Reichel 2005, Bush-Baskette, 1999, Gray, 2001). Additionally, while punitive US drug policies can be seen to have significantly affected the imprisonment of women in general, the greatest increase in the percentage of inmates incarcerated for drug offences is seen in African American women.

An infuriating example of these destructive policies is the case of Yraida Guanipa. Ms. Guanipa has spent the last ten and a half years a Florida federal penitentiary, locked away from her friends, her extended family and her two young children.

Her offense: She agreed to pick up a package for a friend, which turned out to contain cocaine. Although Ms. Guanipa had never been arrested -- had never been a drug user--she received a thirteen-year "drug conspiracy" prison sentence. Her good standing in the community, her lack of criminal background and the fact that she had a 1-year-old and a 2-year old had no impact on her sentence.

But putting aside the moral obtuseness of such absurd enforcement policies-- including the inane "three-strikes you stay locked up, no ifs ands or buts," -- the absolute stupidity of the "War on Drugs" is its prohibitive cost in terms of basic dollars and cents.

At first the War on Drugs" seemed a political brain-stroke-- a real twofer for the Christian Right and their control of Washington's "new Republican majority". By building the extra prisons needed in rural and exurban counties the local Republicans could use their inmates to boost their Congressional numbers-- and since the war was centered in urban communities that consisted overwhelming of black and brown Democrats-- they were concurrently keeping potential voters away from the voting booth (and those pesky unions). The real travesty of the 1990's was the fact that a Democratic president went right along. Yet as far as reducing illegal drug use the impact was virtually nil:

A recent study comparing marijuana use in Amsterdam and San Francisco showed that relative risks of punishment make no difference on levels of use. Despite significantly different law enforcement regimes in these cities, the research found remarkable similarities in drug use patterns (Reinarman, Cohen & Kaal, 2004). Figures show that from 1990 to 2002, daily use of marijuana by high school seniors approached 6%--the exact same level as in 1975.

Not much to show for a program that is costing the Federal government upwards of $9 billion dollars each year. Put another way, the cost of keeping a non-violent drug offender in prison is greater than the cost of tuition, room and board at Yale or Harvard. So while mountains of words and barrels of ink are being spent on describing the need to stimulate the economy and "Reinvest in America" we ignore the ongoing war being waged against our own citizens. As with all wars, there is terrible collateral damage being done to our most vulnerable communities. Worse, by pretending that the problem can be solved simply by locking up the poor and probably many of our most innovative and entrepreneurial minds, we have doomed ourselves to failure. No nation has ever flourished once it becomes unable to care for its least.

Tragically, though we have a president who most certainly understands the consequence of this crippling waste and destruction, Obama fears, no doubt with a bitter dose of irony, that his instincts for change are most likely to be incarcerated by the shade of his skin.