I was quite surprised when I first came across this photo - seeing an interracial factory from the 1920’s where people of color were working side by side next to white folks with dignity.
I grew up in an era when this would not - could not - happen. What went wrong? What factors lead to the systemic oppression of different ethnic groups that made this photo seem unrecognizable to me, a girl who spent her formative years in the Bronx in an ethnically Jewish neighborhood?
With every political issue there are economic underpinnings. And within each economic battle, one group of people is pitted against the other in a web of ongoing power struggles. Two sides of our country’s seemingly different - but really identical - politics with both supported by the agenda of Big Business and the Military Industrial Complex. Each of the issues highlighted below, for which the sensible role of government would be to find amenable solutions, are instead dealt with in ways that add salt to a wound. Pushing toward even greater divisions, from generation to generation a slight tear becomes a rip, and then the rip becomes a split in the fabric of each community. For those left with nowhere to go and nothing to do, a helpless rage is left to seethe.
Manufacturing and Outsourcing
In the 60’s TV changed our lives by bringing war and strife into the comfort of our own livingroom: we could watch the CIVIL RIGHTS and VIETNAM WAR protests, the pushback from police as well as the odious assassinations - one after another - of our leaders, all shooting out from our B+W TV screen (and the advertisers basked in it as revenue went through the roof compared to radio and print).
The government decided to tone down war coverage in the 70’s and sanitize the news channels to obliterate the spectacle while taxpayers looked on. With the backlash of civil rights came poorly thought out integration models and the “ra ra” years of public housing came to a halt. The 80’s moved into an era when “Made in Japan” - instead of previously meaning cheap imported toys - meant high end manufacturing affordable even to the masses. Both the climbing middle class and the rich could buy into and ostentatiously flaunt their new found wealth of this decade.
The 90’s was the decade when domestic US manufacturing shuttered it’s doors. And with no alternatives for the workers this left them vulnerable. Having myself worked in several factories in New Hampshire in the early 70’s, I could empathize with the worker’s plight…while their ex-bosses struck it even richer importing their “Made in….” goods. The only option left for the American worker was to migrate into a service industry, if they could. And if not, the availability of drugs - both prescription and otherwise - became readily available to lessening both the boredom and pain from a lack of being useful and productive.
“Work is about dignity”
~ Chris Hedges
Having lived in Japan from the late 70’s to the early 80’s, I had a unique perspective on the automobile industry shifts. The loss of car manufacturing jobs in the United States was due to the inability of the Detroit-based industries to change gears - metaphorically and pragmatically from their gas guzzlers that Americans no longer could afford - to shift production and make more fuel efficient cars. I listened in disbelief as Detroit simply wouldn’t/couldn’t keep up with Japan’s smaller and more energy efficient, lower priced cars.
The PETRO industry, by contributing some of their insane wealth amassed over a century could have pitched in and supported Detroit to change the design of the engine and size of car to make smaller. Rather they squelched the process. As recently as 2003 GM recalled all their electric vehicles and destroyed them. Hello TESLA.
Wall Street financiers and the middlemen of the private health insurance sector could better repurpose their smarts by developing useful, environmentally friendly products, as their fathers and grandfathers (sorry for the exclusion of mothers and grandmothers) did in yesteryear before NAFTA. You see, Hillary (“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies.” her comment when First Lady) it’s your dream come true because now the children and grandchildren of these mothers simply can’t afford to stay home baking cookies - as well as perform the myriad of necessary everyday tasks. Your husband, by going all in for NAFTA and shipping our essential jobs abroad made all this possible. Households presently have no alternative but to depend upon the 2 income family to make ends meet.
Japanese manufacturers adopted quality control practices developed by American statisticians to rebuild the Japanese industrial base after the Second World War. These practices were based on theories that American manufacturers initially rebuked out of pride. Then it was too late.
Oil and War
After WWII (1940’s) more oil than the US could produce was needed. So they moved into the MIDDLE EAST to source. And the dividends they were willing to share with the oil rich countries were meager. They were using the newly created ISRAELI STATE as a disruptive babysitter and watchdog for the region. That hasn’t changed in almost 80 year…if anything our sense of entitlement has only grown.
In the 50’s the UNITED STATES and ENGLAND struck a deal to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran because they had the audacity to ask for a democratization of the oil wealth. By the 70’s the Middle Eastern oil conglomerate OPEC had enough. They wanted more control over oil profits from resources being dug up within their respective borders or shipped within their waters. The only way these countries could level the playing field and demand a higher stake for profit sharing, as well as take some kind of control, was to make the production scarce and then jack up the price. Americans audaciously argued that since they had control over the technology to unearth it, the oil was in their control. I remember, as gas became scarce and prices skyrocketed (previously we bought gas in Oklahoma for 25 cents a gallon), lines of cars formed for blocks for their ration. This brought on a moment - a few years - when conservation was in the air: people turned off their lights when not using them and began turning to alternative clean energy.
In reaction to MIDDLE EASTERN governments asking for their fair share, we shifted our war priorities away from Southeast Asia and the Communist Scare, to systematically staging war after war in these “resistant” terrorist Middle Eastern countries - toppling governments and putting in place our own dictators who will do the bidding for us. Over 75,000 children alone have starved to death in YEMEN in recent years.
A child in war torn Yemen
After the bombing of the WORLD TRADE CENTER on 9/11/2001, trying to make sense of it all, I naively thought, ‘What could we have done to provoke this?’ Soon after, at a friend’s Jewish Holiday table a French person sitting next to me turned to me in conversation and said, “Well you were the ones who brought the Taliban to power.” I looked back at him in astonishment. My astonishment soon turned to investigation at such a stunning remark.
Here you can find some further reading: How the US helped create AlQaeda and Isis
Global Warming
These wars take a huge economic toll: over half the amount of expenditure from each of us giving our taxes to the Federal government goes directly to this cause. And what about international global warming and material waste expended to feed our military war machine year after year and decade after decade? But most despicable is the utter ravage of war, death and destruction we are bestowing on innocent people who live in these war torn countries, one nation after another.
Our economy in general and the stock market specifically is based upon ever expanding growth. But our planet has finite resources and with a booming population it is not sustainable. Since 1945 the population has ballooned from 2.4 billion to almost 8 billion today. Something has to give.
A paper by BROWN UNIVERSITY in 2019 talks about the cost of the military polluting the planet:
“Global warming is the most certain and immediate of any of the threats that the US faces in the next several decades. In fact, global warming has begun: drought, fire, flooding, and temperature extremes that will lead to displacement and death. The effects of climate change, including extremely powerful storms, famine and diminished access to fresh water, will likely make regions of the world unstable — feeding political tensions and fueling mass migrations and refugee crises...”
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/
THE INTERCEPT concludes:
“The fact that fossil fuel emissions have been the major driver of climate change adds another grim irony to these wars. For decades, the heavy U.S. MILITARY footprint in the MIDDLE EAST has been justified by the need to preserve access to the region’s oil reserves. The industrial extraction of those same reserves has been one of the major drivers of global carbon dioxide emissions.
“In other words, we have been killing, dying, and polluting to ensure our access to the same toxic resource most responsible for our climate disruption. It took this perfect symmetry between industrial warfare and industrial exploitation of the earth to bring about the unspeakable emergency we now face.”
https://theintercept.com/2019/09/15/climate-change-us-military-war/
President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned US citizens about the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address.
The National Debt
With over 50% of our tax dollars going to wars, the NATIONAL DEBT has risen exponentially. The government takes in less funds than it gives out and debt has risen by $2.5 trillion in 2020, bringing it now to a $25.7 trillion dollar debt. What private company could run their debt at a loss for almost 200 consecutive years and still exist?
Yet because of the strength of our lobbyists, major corporations like APPLE + AMAZON, by keeping their profits in overseas accounts, as well as credits and deductions, pay no taxes. And the rich are given tax breaks instead of feeling and seeing the need to bridge this gap. Oh, but then they can donate their pretax dollars from their profits to an institution of their liking: most popular it seems is a university or funding abroad, rather than giving a leg up to those who most need it at home, those who buy these companies products and otherwise support the tax system for them. How can they not pay their due to the system they so dearly profit from?
The Soviet Union imploded upon itself through it’s years of intense, costly militarization. Their invasion into Afghanistan in the 1980’s was the straw that broke the camel’s back. If we are not able to reverse gears, we are headed for our own woeful implosion.
War on Drugs and Incarceration
In the 60’s the CIA imported drugs into the United States to pacify the “war resistant hippies”. These CIA operatives who didn’t have to go through customs when disembarking from planes were the perfect decoy. It was easy for them to bring anything they wanted into this country - poppies/heroin from AFGANISTAN, various drugs from SOUTH EAST ASIA and SOUTH AMERICA. Drugs became the 80’s rage. Accessible to everyone - both wealthy and not. In my previous post State of Our State I cover much of this.
These drugs were a lucrative source of income, selling to inner-city youths through the help of drug cartels. Everyone made huge profits - from the producers to the importers to the politicians and officials who were - and still are - paid off as these drugs continue to enter our borders in mass quantities. I noticed when living in Japan they had no drugs. There was a brief heroin addiction after WWII which the government immediately did away with. “You mean governments can control this?”🤔 In either direction - to give or take away.
And so with the CLINTON era the message came down from government, ironically called a ‘War on Drugs’ to crackdown on the inner city youth taking the drugs. 3 strikes and you’re out - all were in, including the likes of KAMILA HARRIS as a prosecutor who adopted this stance.
This increased the prison population and greatly disrupted family life for those living in cities hit the hardest, while the privatization of the prison institution helped to create a modern day slave labor within our ‘for-profit’ prisons. After sending jobs overseas - first through NAFTA and then the ASIA PACIFIC ALLIANCE for cheap labor, US companies found they could outsource the local prison population to expand profit margins within this country.
The same holds true for the immigrant population: when needed for cheap seasonal labor, they are fine to keep around but when that seasonal labor is no longer needed they are locked in cages (a system started by OBAMA that TRUMP has tried to run with)...once again looking at 2 sides of the same coin. Read more here.
“There’s only one race on the face of the earth, the human race.”
~ Jane Elliott
I grew up in a family who became ‘racist’ and as time went on bought into the concept that black people have smaller brains and are therefore not as smart as whites. The origins of the human race was not anthropologically understood at the time or simply disregarded. The ‘white race’ is now said to be more Neanderthal in origin. It was only when I lived in JAPAN that I was “the other” and saw these factions for what they were - marginalizing a community that you have no intention of getting to know. In JAPAN we were literally called “aliens”. I became involved with an African who worked in an Embassy in Tokyo, then got to know other Africans who worked for the UN - black people who actually carried attaché cases. Some years later I visited Senegal with a friend and it was there that I realized the problem and their seeming stupidity didn’t lie with the Black community. So if the origins of the problem didn’t lie with the oppressed, then there was only one other place to lay blame - at the feet of us, the oppressors! What a stunning realization this was, that the problem has been and continues to be not what we do FOR each other - but rather what we do TO our brethren in the Afro-American community.
During Reconsrtuction, after the Civil War are photos of an integrated Congress - where several Congressman of Color spoke of human rights and enacted laws side by side with the other delegates. Hundreds of others served in state legislatures and hundreds more held local offices across the South. This only reinforced my belief that if only given the chance….
Then it all took a turn for the worse as the Jim Crow laws of segregation were set up as a backlash to the more progressive movement of integration. The White South must have felt threatened to the core. This took it’s toll on the Abolition of Slavery and put it to the test (so much for the Civil War making gains for this community of people). These heinous Jim Crow laws and the lack of integration in Congress continued until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s. With the Civil Rights Act of ’64 and the Voting Rights Act of ’65 change was once again in the air. But even these laws have been put to the test and the Voting Rights Act overturned by the Supreme Court in 2013. When will this STOP!?
The history of racism is the history of powerful policy makers erecting racist policies out of self interest, then producing racist ideas to defend and rationalize the inequitable effects of their policies, while everyday people consume those racist ideas, which in turn sparks ignorance and hate.
- Ibram X. Kendi
When I look at how undemocratic we have become and how in this last century or two we’ve felt it our right to charge into any country around the globe in the name of “Democracy” to topple what we call their Dictator. I see a country that will stop at nothing for the sake of plundering another’s natural resources. Then the military mindset of those who come back from war seat themselves in positions of authority in our government: either policing us or promoting the military abroad, taking every adverse situation they’ve caused and turning it into multiple adversities - never once understanding or being compassionate about individual losses.
When is enough, enough? How do we “fight” back?
We believe there are easy solutions, but only if we as a people have the ability to bond together on issues.
1. Let’s look into who pays for these policies.
Where lies our culpability as taxpayers who support this system of militarism and systemic violence? If we refuse to pay taxes it freezes the government. Otherwise, we must look to the “they” as the “we”, when we pour our hard earned finances to support unacceptable domestic and foreign policy.
2. Let’s demand profit sharing be a part of our work environment.
Can you really see one Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, going around bagging groceries and trucking AMAZON goods around the country? Time and again it’s shown that companies that profit share have more devoted, happier employees. A good example of a 100% employee owned company is PAIGE ELECTRIC. But this company didn’t start out that way. https://thebossmagazine.com/paige-electric/
If your propensity is to profit share by owning stock in others’ companies and you have the extra cash, a friend suggests investing responsibly with an organization such as NEWGROUND SOCIAL INVESTMENT. https://newground.net
I don’t feel this is the right time, if ever there is a right time to invest in funds. Without receiving the bailouts we are in dire need of and the government giving away more of our tax dollars to feed the coffers of the already wealthy while turning away from those in need, we are in for a downturn in the market - a market that cyclically depends upon our very buying dollars.
3. Vote for those who have a record of fighting for policies that really do make America great and who use their political platform to return manufacturing to the States using clean energy. We can grow our crops for fair wages by taking the expenditure that fuel and logistics would need to ship products 1/2 way around the world and instead put it into better wages. An example of this need to bring manufacturing back is the car company TESLA where State governments are begging for it’s manufacturing facility to move to their Sate with enticements of tax breaks.
Vote for those who are interested in changing policies that put everyday citizens in harms way. Vote for those that want to hold police accountable, want to decrease the military budget in favor of benefits to workers with a minimum wage increase, medicare for all, addressing educational issues, enacting laws that put less people behind bars for non-violent crimes and decreasing the existing incarcerated population by releasing those who have committed petty drug crimes.
Voting in local government elections is more important than even. We have shifted from having a federal government that protect people from the unconstitutional laws that were in place in the most racist states during the Civil Rights Movement, to relying on state laws to uphold human rights in the face of a disconnected federal government and Supreme Court that perpetuates racism. State laws make a huge impact.
Racist States and the politicians leading them have taken the vote away from African Americans by gerrymandering and incarcerating huge numbers of African-Americans and then making it illegal for former “felons” to vote, thus silencing a population. Add to this the countless Native Americans who have been put in a position where they can’t vote because they have no legal address at the reservations they live on. In 2013, The Supreme Court freed 9 states to change their election laws without advance federal approval. At the core of the disagreement was whether racial minorities continued to face barriers to voting in states with a history of discrimination.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/supreme-court-ruling.html
4. Let’s stay away from using products from companies whose policies we don’t agree with.
Huge conglomerates are using their buying power to buy out any innovation before it gets to the point of production in this country. (I recently read of AMAZON tactic: right after production they buy a % of company, copy its product and then snuff out its existence.) As a child and into adulthood I grew up knowing the neighborhood stores including the pharmacy and pharmacist - before local small businesses were swallowed up by some nameless private equity firms and replaced with the CVS’s of this Nation.
KOCH INDUSTRIES has an annual revenue of US$110 billion. They build pipelines, run oil and gas enterprises and have horrible environmental and safety records. For generations they have thrown environmental waste into our rivers. One example is when they illegally dumped a million gallons of high-ammonia wastewater onto the ground that went into the Mississippi River.
Its founder and namesake, Fred C. Koch, was an early organizer and heavy donator of the JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY. This society opposed the CIVIL RIGHTS ACT of 1964 (by saying it was a Communist plot 40 years in the making - sound familiar?) as well as the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT and immigration policies.
More recently the heirs to the thrown - the founder’s sons - have supported and created Think Tanks that, for the past 40 years, have directly influenced public policy as well as funding of conservative groups such as the TEA PARTY. They influence Presidential policy directly. (Is this why it is said they plowed $880 million into the 2016 presidential election year alone). They oppose clean energy and any kind of carbon legislation, influencing then President G.W. BUSH to withdraw support of research into global warming. They held the first ever gathering of climate change skeptics in 1991 (of course, it would cut into their bottom line). And although the brothers in recent years have assigned a pittance of their money to more socially minded programs, it seems like it’s just a smoke and mirrors tactic. Their MANHATTAN INSTITUTE THINK TANK was behind BILL CLINTON’s horrific bills promoting welfare “reform” in the mid-1990s, thus cutting the budget for much needed help in poor communities, without offering up any alternatives.
Through their lobbying efforts and the Supreme Court ruling to deregulate limits on campaign financing, the Koch Bros have been able to move in and decide how to regulate our lives through government.
They sell household products under the brand names Brawny, Angel Soft, Mardi Gras, Quilted Northern, Dixie, Sparkle, and Vanity Fair. How easy it would be for us to avoid buying these brands in favor of others.
5. Let’s come togeher.
Utilize the practices of consensus decision making, a cornerstone of Quaker governing. In short, every decision is unanimous and if all members of the conversation cannot agree, no action is taken and they reconvene at a latter date. Because decisions are taken so seriously and aim to appeal to all, each member of the discussion must come prepared to both participate and listen carefully. And to not only be prepared to share their insights but also for each one’s perspective to adapt so that everyone can recognize the same unifying truth. The most important thing we can all do is listen to the reasoning behind each person’s viewpoint.
https://www.afsc.org/testimonies/decision-making
If all else fails, give States more autonomy and follow a European Union model.
Local governments have to directly answer to their communities, while large corporations and the federal government do not.
We have to stop fighting imagined, mirage-like factions that the existing oligarchy/duopoly is only too happy to keep us distracted by. Instead we have to come together and create forums at the grass roots level. Solutions for ALL.
In doing this we gain purpose and take back not only our voices but our lives.
It’s a grim picture if we don’t act immediately. But if we do come together sensibly - and with the aid of plants surrounding us in our houses, apartments or rooms 😊 - we will get through this.
~Jody Harrow