Idiocracy and the Wall

Hola Everybody,

Yeah, it’s cold, but I love living in a temperate zone where the seasons change. Or at least they did before climate change J

Wall Street

Fact: Some young Black and Latino men are detained at Rikers Island -- New York City’s penal colony -- at the cost of upwards to $2000,000per human being annually.
Fact: Public officials resist increases in education spending. A fraction of what it costs to lock a child up.
Fact: Overwhelmingly, incarcerated children are people of color.

As a young man, one summer I managed to get a messenger job at a small brokerage house on Wall St. One of my best friends, a darker-skinned brother, had been working there before me and he put in the good word. By the end of the summer, I had moved up (again, with the help of my friend) and was now balancing the sheets. That was a promotion and a raise.

I was very young back then and not too motivated. I wasn’t very responsible: I would miss days and I wasn’t all that inspired. Yet, when another promotion came up later that year, my friend was passed up and the promotion was offered to me. This was bullshit, and everybody knew it. My friend had been there longer than I had, had more experience, and was there at work every day. We both know it was because I was light-skinned and he wasn’t. I was going to quit because I couldn’t bear it, but my friend insisted that I take the job. He said they would only give it to someone else.

We learned early on it paid to look or be white!

I mention this because I spent most of my young adulthood working at various places on Wall St. Let me tell you: Wall St. in the 1980s?! DAMN! It was crazy out there! The culture of Wall St. and my love for the party life took me down hard. By the end of the 80s, I was blackballed from working on the Street, spiraling deep into my addiction. I worked hard and I played harder. It wasn’t unusual to go on a business lunch and instead of it being a two-martini lunch, it was acceptable -- even expected -- to have a three-line lunch. Cocaine was king on the Street. I can’t say it was all regret. I fact, I had a lot of fun. I partied a lot, used a lot, spent a lot -- well, you get the idea.

I had two very close friends -- crib brothers as we used to say back in the day. Where you saw one, the others weren’t too far behind. We grew up together, became men together and we worked on the Street.

Anyway, we would always meet at this park -- Jeannette Park -- at lunch on Fridays to drink rum and coke, and smoke weed, plan our weekends. One day, there was this older black dude who always seemed to check us out. I mean, we were pretty much out there, always surrounded by women, and dressed to the nines -- young and cocksure muthafuckas. Anyway, this dude came up to us and shared some of this fierce weed he was smoking and he told us a story I never forgot. He asked if we knew the history of where we were standing and acting all cocksure and shit, and I told him, me always being the smartass, “Yeah! Fuckin' Wall St.!” He smiled... 

He said, Wall Street became the financial capitalist center because it was the first big slave trade center in the colonies, and, later, the new nation’s principal slave trading port, where the business of slavery was transacted (until 1862).

He continued, And as the business of slavery went, so did all other businesses. For about 125 years, there was a wall that separated the financiers, speculators and bankers from the stench, humiliation, and daily grime of young New York’s vibrant slave trade business and African and white working-class residential areas.

Hence the name, Wall St.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Cornering the Market

Hola Everybody,
In an intro to Metro Studies class, I had a wonderful professor, Robert Fitch. He authored The Assassination of New York, a cutting and searing indictment of the financial and real-estate elites who wrecked New York. Unfortunately, Mr. Fitch passed on several years ago. He was an inspiring and passionate teacher. Anyway… 

Cornering the Market

These ‘new’ whitemen were called scramblers because they would rush on board a Slaveship before it docks and brave the filthy stench...
 -- Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados

I bring up Robert Fitch because he spent at least one-third of that intro course expounding on capitalism and how it was such a great boon to Western civilization. Finally, unable to take it anymore, I raised my hand and asked, “But what would’ve capitalism have looked like without the slave trade?”

The man smiled so wide, I thought his face would crack and he said, “I thought you would never ask… ” and he began what was one of the more insightful take downs of capitalism I had ever heard. After class, he called me over and expressed that he thought no one would ever ask that question.

Why bring this up, you ask? Read on… 

First let me start in this way: not that long ago, I overheard two former colleagues describing a bigoted real estate player as a “cracker.” My colleagues were white, raised in the northeast, progressive-thinking, activists -- two people I hold in high esteem. Anybody that knows me even for a little while knows that I’m not exactly “politically correct.” I transgress at least once a day.

I am also a lover of words and love to explore word and phrase origins. Having lived in the deep South, I was aware of the word’s origin. Well, at least as it was explained to me by a genuine “cracker.” He said that the word cracker came from the sound of the whip used to beat slaves. When I informed my colleagues, they were horrified! They never used the word again. Of course, from that point on, I went out of of my way to say “cracker” in their presence at least once a month.

Language is a powerful thing and many of our everyday words and phrases come from ignoble origins. Take “handicap,” for example. Handicap comes from the phrase “hand in cap” used to describe the physically challenged who were forced to beg for money for their survival. Not a nice.

Which brings me to my point today. Let’s take the common phrase, “cornering the market.” To corner the market is a good thing, right? It means dominating and economically exploiting a market. It’s “winning.” Not bad, right? Well the phrase has its origin from the behavior of “scramblers.” Scramblers would rush on board a slave ship before it even docked. They would wade through the filth and death stench of these slave ships so they could get their pick of the healthiest looking captives. They would separate their picks from the rest and have them placed in a corner of the deck. Hence the origin of the capitalist term “to corner the market.”

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

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Victory at Standing Rock

Hola Everybody,
Whew! Yesterday’s victory over the Dakota Access pipeline was a breath of fresh air. And yeah, people, we know that this is a temporary setback to corporates and that the struggle continues -- we don’t need you to remind us, sparky.

Fascism and Resistance

Fascism should be more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.
 -- Giovanni Gentile

Let me just state at the beginning that … No! The struggle that got the U.S. federal government to decide not issue the permit necessary for continuing construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, is not an example of working within the system to create change. Our First Nation brothers and sister sacrificed and were ignored and beaten, tortured, and arrested for their stance. STFU with that bullshit.

It amazes me to no end to continue to hear (without challenge from all forms of media) the ridiculous assumption that we should continue to be subservient to and provide mind-boggling tax breaks for corporate elites (welfare for the rich). Even more confounding is the fact that a significant (mostly white) section of the United States electorate will vote against their economic interests. The Dakota Access Pipeline is a prime example of corporate welfare.

However, it shouldn’t be so confounding. We are there -- we are a quasi-fascist state. You might say I am being dramatic, or that I have lost my bearings and I would respond that you’ve had your head stuck in the sand too long. Take the blinders off for a moment and let’s look at the state of our affairs for a moment. Pretend this isn’t “America” and you tell me if I’m off… 

First, let me establish, and I think most sane people will agree, that corporations today wield an enormous amount of influence over our government. It’s evident in the way elections are run and how our economic and social policies are framed and created. During the election, outside of Bernie Sanders, who was completely blacked out of the mainstream media, no one was talking about a rigged economy or inequality. Poverty and the crisis of man-made catastrophic climate change, was not mentioned at all during the presidential debates. In fact, a climate change denier is now the president -elect. Bankruptcy laws were written by credit card companies, signed into law as is. 

Corporations influence our environmental policies for the most part as evidenced by resistance movements against fracking and oil pipelines. The US spends more on its military than the next seven largest military budgets around the world, combined. This is a social welfare policy that results in billions of profits for corporations. The list goes on. Everywhere we look today, we see the handiwork of corporations, of the mindset of profits before people.

That is not democracy. We are not a democracy. We are not what we have been conditioned to believe all these years.

Franklin Delano’s Roosevelt’s administration came to power in the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression. While he couldn’t know he was going to fight a war in Europe, he did know and planned to fight a war in the US -- a war on what he called the “economic royalists.” FDR, a member of the economic elite, was also fearful of the rise of socialism as people who could not afford to eat were turning to other forms of governance for answers to their hunger. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia in 1936, Roosevelt uttered the following words:

Philadelphia is a good city in which to write American history. This is fitting ground on which to reaffirm the faith of our fathers; to pledge ourselves to restore to the people a wider freedom; to give to 1936 as the founders gave to 1776 - an American way of life.

That very word freedom, in itself and of necessity, suggests freedom from some restraining power. In 1776, we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy - from the eighteenth-century royalists who held special privileges from the crown… 

And so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that the American Revolution was fought. That victory gave the business of governing into the hands of the average man, who won the right with his neighbors to make and order his own destiny through his own government. Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.

Of course, when FDR yelled “freedom,” he meant freedom for white men. And when he spoke of the power of the people to decide their own destinies, he wasn’t really thinking about people of color. And when he stated the death of tyranny, he did so while ignoring centuries of state-sponsored tyranny against blacks and First Nation people. Still, he had his finger on the pulse of the intellectual revolt that was occurring throughout the land. More… 

Since that struggle, however, man’s inventive genius released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our people. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution -- all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.

For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital -- all undreamed of by the Fathers -- the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small-businessmen and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.

I encourage you to read the speech in full (here) because FDR’s speech is as relevant today as it was then. We have come full circle where the power of the corporations -- of FDR’s “economic royalists” -- has eclipsed the power of government “by and for the people.”

So when you hear ridiculous talk about giving tax breaks to the wealthy and how it is in our best interests to cede our hard-earned money and our power to those interests, raise your head from the sand and dare to speak truth to power.

If you don’t, who will? That’s why today, I hail our First Nation brothers and sisters for their bravery, foresight, and sacrifice in the face of the brutality and the power of the moneyed elite. Theirs is the example we must follow. Shit, if the election of Trump won’t get the masses of their asses, I don’t think anything will.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

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Reflections on the Passing of Fidel Castro

Hola mi Gente,
I woke up late this morning (I’m struggling to get up) to discover that Fidel Castro passed away at the ripe old age of 90. My newsfeeds and social media platforms are rife with anti-Castro propaganda. Let’s be clear here, the only reason the corporate media demonizes Castro is not because of his alleged human rights violations, but because he stood up to US imperialism and lived to talk about it. If the US was so concerned with human rights, it would not be enslaving and murdering innocent people here and across the globe.

I have two things to say. One: Are the Cuban people better off today than they were before the revolution? I think the facts (i.e., healthcare, literacy, life expectancy, autonomy, etc.) clearly show they are. Secondly, yeah, Fidel Castro was so evil he offered to send doctors and medical supplies to help victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, while George W. Bush, who declined his offer, watched poor black people die from the safety of an airplane.

That last one was me being facetious, yeah. Along with Castro’s passing, there will be the usual “debates” on socialism and communism (most US citizens don’t know the difference). Along with those discussions will come the inevitable expression/ belief that capitalism is not only superior, but an inevitable feature of the human condition. Fidel and I disagree… 

Capitalism and Rape

Greed is good.
-- Gordon Gekko, Wall Street

Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography 

[Note: A blind adherence to the virtues of “free markets” is symptomatic to neoliberal thought. Below, in an essay I adapted several years ago, I try to uncover the faulty reasoning behind the dogma.]

Consider the following:

Rape is a basic and necessary expression of human nature. Sexual assaults have been present in every society since the dawn of time. It is the natural drive of man to reproduce, to compete successfully for advantage in the marketplace of life and evolution. In fact, it is this innate compulsion to reproduce that motivates man to do anything productive and worthwhile in the first place.

It is this competitive drive that motivates man to aspire to greatness. Can you imagine men striving for greatness were they not motivated by their drive to reproduce by any means? Of course not, because the drive to reproduce is at the very core of mankind’s fundamental nature. As long as we disregard childish “God” superstitions and recognize that a man is ultimately responsible only to and for himself, we therefore recognize that any measures that attempt to suppress this natural and intrinsic drive to reproduce by any means are inherently wrong.

To suppress sexual assaults is the perverse anti-human dream of the superstitious rabble. In fact, no human society has successfully eliminated rape, despite innumerable measures designed to curb sexual assaults. If man were only truly free to pursue this integral part of his nature we would walk as the masters of the Earth that we are.

Anyone with a relatively functioning forebrain will see that this is a painfully faulty and dangerous chain of reasoning. Just because the drive to reproduce is inherent in humans, it doesn’t follow that sexual assault and rape stem from that drive and are a part of human nature. Furthermore, that every society has been beset by sexual assault and none has successfully eliminated rape, doesn’t necessarily mean that sexual assault and rape are things that should be encouraged, or that there wouldn’t be disastrous and apocalyptic consequences were people given carte blanche to rape.

Now, reread the above but this time replace every occurrence of the words “sexual assault” with the words “free markets,” and replace every occurrence of the word “rape” with “capitalism,” and every occurrence of the word “reproduce” with “acquire wealth.” It is now word-for-word the position of economic neoliberal types such as Clinton, Trump, and Obama. You will find this same line of thought in rationales against universal healthcare, for example, and free postsecondary education.

Well, boys and girls: what have we learned? First, my aim here is not merely to equate capitalism with rape (not a bad area to explore in future writings). Rather, my goal is to point out fallacious reasoning. Certain things might be inherently part of human nature or cannot be completely eliminated, but that isn’t a sufficient condition for a logically cohesive argument that should be encouraged. If you want to argue that they should be encouraged, you must give other reasons.

The other reason for this is the unthinking and reactionary response of “socialism doesn’t work,” which displays an ignorance of the enormous and diverse body of economic and ethical thought outside of the current U.S. political and moral paradigm.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

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