Our nation, so richly endowed with natural resources and with a capable and industrious population, should be able to devise ways and means of insuring to all our able-bodied men and women, a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

– Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1937

Millions of people in the US work and are still poor. Here are eight points that show why the US needs to dedicate itself to making work pay.

One. How many people work and are still poor?

In 2011, the US Department of Labor reported at least 10 million people worked and were still below the unrealistic official US poverty line, an increase of 1.5 million more than the last time they checked. The US poverty line is $18,530 for a mom and two kids. Since 2007 the numbers of working poor have been increasing. About 7 percent of all workers and 4 percent of all full-time workers earn wages that leave them below the poverty line.

Two. What kinds of jobs do the working poor have?

One third of the working poor, over 3 million people, work in the service industry. Workers in other occupations are also poor: 16 percent of those in farming; 11 percent in construction; and 11 percent in sales.

Three. Which workers are most likely to be working and still poor?

Women workers are more likely to be poor than men. African American and Hispanic workers are about twice as likely to be poor as whites. College graduates have a 2 percent poverty rate while workers without a high school diploma have a poverty rate 10 times higher at 20 percent.

Four. What about benefits for low wage workers?

Ten percent of US workers earn $8.50 an hour or less according to the US Department of Labor. About 12 percent have health care and about 12 percent have retirement benefits. Nearly one in four get paid sick leave and less than half get paid vacation leave.

Five. What rights do the working poor have?

Most workers have a right to earn at least the federal minimum wage of $7.50 an hour. Tipped employees are supposed to get at least $2.13 each hour from their employer and if the worker does not earn enough in tips to make the $7.50 minimum wage, the employer must make up the difference. People who work more than 40 hours in a workweek are entitled to one and one-half of their regular pay for each hour of overtime.

Six. What about wage theft from the working poor?

Many low wage workers have part of their earnings stolen by their employers. Examples include not paying people the full minimum wage, not paying required overtime, stealing from tipped employees, or fraudulently classifying workers as independent contractors. A survey of over 4000 low wage workers in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York conducted by university and non-profit researchers found: 26 percent of the workers were paid less than the minimum wage in the previous week, a majority were underpaid by more than $1 an hour; a significant number worked overtime the previous week and were not paid the legally required overtime; many were required to come early or stay late and work “off the clock” and were not paid for it; almost a third of the tipped workers were not paid the minimum wage and more than 1 in 10 tipped workers had some of their money stolen by their employer or supervisor.

Seven. What is a living wage in the US?

Dr. Amy Glasmeier of Penn State University has created a Living Wage Calculator that estimates the hourly wage needed to pay the cost of living for low wage families in the US. It breaks down the cost of living by state and locality across the nation. In New Orleans, a mom with one child needs to earn $17.52 to make ends meet. In New York, the mom with one child should earn $19.66 to make it. If we now realistically calculate the number of people who work and do not earn a living wage, the numbers of working poor in the US skyrocket to several tens of millions.

Eight. What about jobs for the unemployed and underemployed?

The US Labor Department estimated recently that 13 million people were unemployed. Another 8 million people were working part-time but wanted full-time work. Even more millions who are not working are not counted in those numbers because they have been unemployed so long.

A study by Northeastern University found that in the poorest families, unemployment is nearly 31 percent. Underemployment is also much more of a problem in poor homes, with over 20 percent of those workers reporting they are working part-time but seeking full-time work.

Our nation can do so much more. We say our country values work. It is time to do something about it.

If the US truly values work, we need to support the millions of our sisters and brothers who are low wage workers. Steps needed include: raising the minimum wage to a living wage; protecting workers from getting ripped off; making it easier for workers to organize together if they choose to; and creating jobs, public jobs if necessary, so that everyone who wants to work can do so. Many are already working on these justice issues.

For those interested in learning more about this, see the websites of Interfaith Worker Justice, the National Employment Law Project, and the National Jobs for All Coalition.

“Everything that the American troops have done in Iraq–all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering–all of it has led to this moment of success,” Obama said. “[W]e’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.”

Such claims are a lie. None of this rhetoric can disguise the terrible waste of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq–as many as 1 million Iraqis dead, millions more driven from their homes, along with 4,500 U.S. soldiers killed, 32,000 wounded and nearly $1 trillion gone.

Obama’s claims about America’s “extraordinary achievement” in Iraq are Orwellian. In reality, the U.S. war and occupation further wrecked an already devastated country, left it in a shambles rather than rebuild it and stoked sectarianism between Iraq’s three main groups–Kurds, Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims.

The U.S. already precipitated one civil war between Sunnis and Shias in 2006. And now, sectarian conflicts are threatening to explode again.

Shortly after the U.S. withdrawal, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shia, attempted to arrest Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni. Hashimi fled to the Kurdish region for sanctuary. Sunni Salafists, who view Shias as infidels, have launched a wave of attacks that killed scores of Shia during their religious holiday of Arbaeen.

Post-occupation Iraq may be poised to descend into three-cornered warfare.

In the 1970s, Iraqis–though living under the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein’s regime–had achieved economic development and living standards on a par with Greece.

Over the last three decades, the U.S. has wrecked the country.

The U.S. launched the 1991 Gulf War to prevent Iraq from becoming a regional power that could threaten American control over the Middle East and its strategic oil reserves. The first Gulf War killed 300,000 Iraqis and destroyed the country’s infrastructure. Afterward, sanctions crippled Iraq’s economy, prevented reconstruction of the country, and led to the deaths of as many as 1.5 million more people.

In 2003, the Bush administration justified its invasion of the country with fabricated claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. In reality, Bush hoped the invasion would begin a series of regime changes in the region, including in Iran and Syria. With allied regimes in place in these countries, the U.S. would be able to dominate the region, control access to oil and thereby assert power over its international rivals, especially China.

The invasion quickly succeeded in toppling Saddam Hussein. But in short order, the Iraqi resistance to occupation destroyed Bush’s imperial fantasies.

Nevertheless, the U.S. occupation inflicted a terrible price on Iraqis. The Lancet medical journal estimated that between the invasion in March 2003 and June 2006, there were 650,000 civilian deaths directly and indirectly attributable to the war. Opinion Research Business, a British polling agency, used the Lancet‘s methodology to estimate over a million civilian deaths between March 2003 and August 2007.

Far from rebuilding Iraq as promised, Iraq remains in worse shape today, eight years after the invasion, than it was Saddam Hussein.

Outside of the Kurdish north, most Iraqis still go without regular electricity and don’t have reliable supplies of potable water. The Iraqi economy is in disastrous shape, with sky-high levels of unemployment and poverty. Journalist Juan Cole reports that the number of Iraqis living in slums jumped from 17 percent before the occupation to 50 percent today.

Instead of leaving behind a stable democracy responsive to its people, the U.S. established a corrupt state similar to that in Lebanon. Kurdish, Sunni and Shia ruling classes compete, via their political parties, in a three-way battle for the spoils of the national government. According to Transparency International, Iraq’s new government is the eighth-most corrupt in the world.

Perhaps the single-worst aspect of the entire legacy of occupation is the sectarianism and ethnic chauvinism that the U.S. consciously stoked and then used as the basis of the country’s new political system.

Iraq had a history of ethnic and religious oppression–though nominally secular, Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime was predominantly Sunni. It repressed Kurdish aspirations for self-determination, and crushed Kurdish and Shia uprisings at the end of the first Gulf War.

Iraq, however, did not have a history of mass sectarianism and ethnic cleansing. But the U.S. occupation magnified and militarized these divisions, eventually triggering a full-blown civil war between Sunnis and Shias in Baghdad during 2006.

Iraq’s three major groups–Shia, Sunni and Kurds–reacted differently to the 2003 invasion.

The Sunni ruling class saw the U.S. war as an attack on its historic control over the country–confirmed by the occupation authorities’ “de-Baathification” program that hit Sunnis the hardest–and it went into resistance right away. The Kurdish ruling class, on the other hand, saw the invasion as a chance to consolidate its autonomous zone in the North, established after the first Gulf War.

The Shia ruling class and its religious parties Dawa and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) tried to use the invasion to gain control of the new government. Since the Shia were a majority of Iraq’s population, Dawa and the ISCI pressed hard for elections to consolidate their dominance–which encouraged Sunnis to view them with hostility. Only the Shia nationalist Moktada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army organized protests against the occupation.

When the U.S. targeted Sadr and his followers with repression, it raised the possibility of an Arab opposition uniting Sunnis and Shia against the occupation. In response, the U.S. turned to the oldest trick in the imperialist book–divide and conquer.

When the U.S. appointed up an Interim Governing Council, it used the Lebanese model, assigning each community representatives in proportion to their percentage of the population. But the pressure continued for elections. When they came, the U.S. had designed them in a fashion that cemented the religious and ethnic divisions in Iraqi society. As author Nir Rosen wrote:

Iraq’s election law itself seemed designed to promote civil war. Although the diverse country is divide into 18 province, it had only one electoral district…Ethnic and religious blocs preferred one district because they were nationally known, and they would be able to avoid challengers who had genuine grassroots local support.

Faced with impending defeat, the Sunni elite called for a boycott of the elections, which culminated in the victory for a succession of Shia-dominated governments. Sunni Salafist forces organized in various formations, including Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. The Salafists staged a series of bombings and attacks on Shia civilians. Even the Sadrists turned against the Sunnis then.

A civil war between Shia and Sunni exploded in 2006, with Baghdad as the chief battleground.

Instead of using its occupation forces to stop the conflict, the U.S. fueled it. Washington’s Ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, had made his mark during the Reagan administration, backing death squads in Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua against left-wing movements and governments.

Negroponte implemented the so-called “Salvador Option” of backing Shia death squads against the Sunni resistance. He encouraged the Shia ISCI party to incorporate its militia, the Badr Brigades, into the Interior Ministry’s security forces. He then encouraged them to target not only the Salafists, but also the Sunni resistance itself.

The Shia-dominated Badr Bridgades and sections of Sadr’s Mahdi Army launched a massive counter-attack against Sunnis in Baghdad. Entire neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed.

In the end, according to the UN Refugee Agency, the fighting drove 4.7 million from their homes. Over 2 million mostly Sunnis fled the country, half of them to Syria, and another 2 million were internally displaced.

“There is no national identity any longer,” Ghassan al-Attiyah, an Iraqi political scientist and commentator, told journalist Patrick Cockburn. “Iraqis are either Sunni, Shia or Kurd.”

Negroponte and the U.S. had another twist in store. In 2007, the U.S. made overtures to sections of the Sunni elite–as part of the so-called “surge” of troops into Iraq–with the aim of exploiting divisions between the broader Sunni resistance and the Salafist groups. Over the protests of the Maliki government, the U.S. hired 100,000 Sunni resistance fighters and paid them $300 a month to form the Awakening Councils to fight a proxy war against the Salafists.

U.S. policies enflamed the sectarian conflict not only in Iraq, but across the Middle East.

The U.S. had planned to move on from Iraq to take down the Shia-dominated regime in Iran and Iran’s allies in power in Syria. But bogged down by the Iraqi resistance and the civil war, the U.S. hand in the Middle East was growing weaker. Iran gradually became as influential in Iraq as the U.S. itself.

The U.S. responded by raising the specter of a “Shia Crescent,” headquartered in Iran and extending through a Shia-dominated Iraq to Syria and the forces of Hezbollah in Lebanon. As Nir Rosen wrote, “The Bush administration contributed to regional sectarianism, seeking to bolster the so-called ‘moderate Sunni regimes’ (dictatorships like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, viewed as moderate because they collaborated with Israel and the United States) against Iran or Hezbollah.”

U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia were only too happy to respond to the call for a network of Sunni states aligned with the U.S. against Iran and its influence in Iraq. The Saudis, along with the U.S. and Turkey, poured money into Iraqiya, an Iraqi party led by the secular Shia Ayad Allawi, but which had won 80 percent of the Sunni vote in recent elections. Iran, on the other hand, backed the Shia formations, from ISCI to Dawa and the Sadrists.

The battle over control of the Iraqi state came to a head in the 2010 parliamentary elections. Because of disagreements among them, the Shia parties didn’t put up candidates as part of a united slate, and Iraqiya was able to win the largest block of seats in parliament. Nevertheless, Maliki was able to unite the Shia parties to form a government.

The Sadrists agreed to participate–but on the condition that Maliki refuse to renegotiate the Status of Forces Agreement that the Bush administration had struck with the Iraqi government in 2008. Under the agreement, the U.S. was required to withdraw completely from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Despite pressure from the Obama administration to allow some number of U.S. military troops to remain in Iraq, with immunity from prosecution, Maliki refused to go along, and the U.S. was forced to pull its last soldiers out of Iraq in the middle of the night on December 18.

With the U.S. left with only a force of mercenaries in Iraq working for the State Department out of the giant Baghdad embassy, the situation in Iraq has reached a new stage–and the sectarian conflict threatens to explode once again into civil war.

Each of the sections of Iraqi ruling class is angling for full or partial control over the state, leadership of Iraq’s 900,000 military troops and police, and access to the country’s huge oil revenues.

The Kurdish ruling class, represented by Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, aims to consolidate its autonomous province and seize control of the contested city of Kirkuk, with its large oil reserves. Sunni politicians, represented in parliament by Allawi’s Irakiya party, want to establish a Sunni autonomous zone. Meanwhile, Shia leaders in Nuri al-Maliki’s coalition government aim to consolidate their rule over the country as a whole.

These schisms have detonated a political crisis.

Less than 24 hours after U.S. forces withdrew, Maliki, responding to an assassination attempt, ordered the arrest of Hashimi, the Sunni vice president of the coalition government, on terrorism charges mainly relating to the 2006-07 period. Hashimi fled to the autonomous Kurdish territory, where he remains. Maliki’s forces were able to arrest the vice president’s bodyguards, who were coerced into confessing to terrorist activities on national television.

Thousands of Sunnis have protested in various cities against the threatened arrest of Hashimi. The Iraqiya Party is now boycotting parliament and cabinet meetings to protest what it describes as Maliki’s attempt to consolidate dictatorial power, particularly over the security forces. Iraqiya is calling for Maliki to step down or face a no confidence vote.

At the same time, Sunni Salafist guerillas have launched a wave of attacks on Shia civilians and religious pilgrims. The Salafists have killed 145 Shias on a pilgrimage during the Arbaeen holidays. In one horrific attack on January 5, Salafists killed 78 pilgrims in Nasiriyah.

It is hard to predict whether the political crisis will descend into a full-blown civil war, but there are certainly dynamics driving in that direction.

For their part, the Salafists are intent on causing this. Leaders among the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish ruling classes also have an interest in playing the sectarian card to divert the anger of a desperate working class and urban poor onto other religious and ethnic groups.

The flashpoints are clear. Maliki’s attempt to consolidate a Shia state is a provocation to both Sunnis and Kurds. As Nir Rosen writes, “Government buildings are decorated with Shiite flags, banners and posters, and these can be seen even on Iraqi Army and Police vehicles and checkpoints. Not only is there no separation of church and state, there is no separation of state and sect.”

The Sunni elite’s demand for a Sunni autonomous zone could lead to another round of ethnic cleansing. Any such zone would contain a significant Shia minority who would be second-class citizens. No doubt the Salafists would take the opportunity to target the Shia, and this would provoke counter-attacks on Sunni minorities in predominantly Shia areas.

The Sunni Awakening Councils could also turn against the Shia government. The U.S., which had been bankrolling the Awakening Councils, has pressured Maliki into continue the payments and incorporating the councils into the Iraqi military. But Maliki has only hired one-sixth of these fighters. The well-armed Awakening Councils could be the basis of Sunni military attacks on Maliki’s ramshackle army.

Meanwhile, the long-simmering conflict between Arab and Kurdish rulers in Iraq could explode over control of the northern city of Kirkuk. Kirkuk sits on key oil reserves that would be a bonanza for whoever rules over it. A long-running, low-intensity conflict between Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Arabs could reignite at any time.

On the other hand, there are interests and dynamics that could prevent the slide toward civil war.

The Shia, Sunni and Kurdish ruling classes have a stake in maintaining access to the national state and its oil profits. If the conflict goes too far, this would undermine their ability to continue to enrich themselves through state office. As journalist Patrick Cockburn wrote:

Disaster may come, but perhaps not yet. Iraqi politics can be misleading because, with the country so violent at the best of times, furious political confrontations do not necessarily lead to all-out conflict. Each side has a lot to lose from the final disintegration of the state.

Sunni rulers also recognize that they lost the last battle with Shia forces, and that they would likely lose any fight with either the Kurds, who have their own military forces in the Peshmerga, or the Shia, who control Iraqi military as well as a network of their own militias.

Among the Iraqi masses, there is also a deep weariness after three decades of war, sanctions, occupation and civil war. There is mass discontent with the entire government and distrust of national political parties that are widely perceived as corrupt, and only out to stuff their own pockets with government cash.

But no national political force has emerged to galvanize a united resistance among workers and urban poor against the government and the sectarian and chauvinist parties that dominate it. At various points, Iraqi oil workers seemed to point a way forward, but they have yet to create a national union movement nor a political party of their own that can break out of the stranglehold of communalist politics.

The U.S. and regional powers like Iran and Saudi Arabia will also be a factor in whether or not Iraq erupts in another civil war.

Each side in Iraq is weak in important ways, and so it looks to international sponsors for money and support. The Kurds look to the U.S. The Sunnis look to Saudi Arabia. And the Shia look to Iran and Syria. Thus, the growing schisms between the U.S. and the Sunni regimes it is allied with on the one hand, and Iran and its Shia allies on the other, will rebound into Iraq.

The U.S. remains the key player in all this. It has suffered a major defeat by having been forced to withdraw its military forces from Iraq. As a result, Iran has emerged as the principal victor of the Iraq war, with increased influence in the region. It now has a government dominated by Shia parties in control of Iraq to add to its historic relationship with the regime in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The U.S. also faces a threat from below in the form of the Arab Revolutions, which have toppled two U.S. allies in Tunisia and Egypt and shaken other regimes in Washington’s network of Sunni monarchies and dictatorships.

But the U.S. is determined to shore up its declining influence in the region. It wants to maintain its power in Iraq itself. It still retains a large military base in the country, otherwise known as the U.S. Embassy. This facility is the size of 80 football fields and employs 16,000 staff, 5,000 of whom are military contractors. The U.S. hopes to be the broker between the various forces inside Iraq, using its alliance with the Sunnis and Kurds to prevent the full consolidation of a Shia state aligned with Iran.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is escalating its conflict with Iran, using the cover of Iran supposedly developing–does this sound familiar?–nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Washington’s allies Israel and Saudi Arabia are also important actors in a conflict that revolves around the same imperial interests at stake in the invasion of Iraq–control of Middle East oil and geopolitical dominance.

Thus, the sectarian conflict that the U.S. stoked in Iraq is being reproduced on a regional level–with the U.S., Israel and a network of Sunni regimes confronting Iran’s Shia government and its allies. The catastrophe that took place with the civil war in Iraq–and that threatens to break out again–could play out regionally, with horrifying consequences.

The hope amid this horror is working class solidarity across the ethnic and religious divisions. This is not a fantasy, but has been demonstrated at the high points of the Arab revolutions, such as the efforts to unite Muslims in defense of the oppressed Christian Copt minority in Egypt.

In reality, only the ruling class benefits from such communalist divisions. Sectarianism cannot provide jobs, electricity, food nor housing for working people and the poor. The working class in Iraq and throughout the Middle East will have to combat sectarianism, religious oppression and national oppression on the road to uniting the Arab working class in a struggle for a new Middle East.

Only such a struggle can stop the horrors that imperialism has unleashed in the form of ethnic cleansing, civil war, and regional war.

There would be no economy without a constant inflow of natural resources like the sun and the atmosphere, the soil, the seas, fossil fuels, minerals, etc throughput in the system. Most classical economists had their vision of a “stationary state” — the ontological destination of economic growth and development constrained by the planet’s population exploration vis-à-vis finiteness of arable land and the exhaustibility of non-renewable resources. Humanity does not produce these “fictitious commodities” but exploits them, as observed by Karl Polanyi in his pathbreaking treatise The Great Transformation (1944). Simply by holding title to a portfolio of real property, without any effort to increase their value, one could quickly turn a profit from social investments, as revealed in classical prudence. Karl Marx’s entire critique of political economy is based on the contradictions between use value and exchange value. Marx established that the soil had no “indestructible powers,” as it could be degraded leading to ecological destruction.

Marxism was never a major force in United States. The primary challenge to the classical tradition came from what has since come to be known as neo-classical economics. The classical tradition of economic thought was ably synthesized and represented by one dominant figure of the age in America: Henry George. His 1879 book, Progress and Poverty sold more copies throughout the world than any book till that time except the Bible. George propagated that conflating land into capital allowed land rent to be concealed and diluted and the undeserving windfalls accrued to “leisure class” speculators and led to depression of labour wages at the margin. Following the classical tradition, George recognized that there is no justification for the titleholders to reap the return of what society has invested. George advocated for a progressive tax because land was mostly concentrated among the wealthy. Mason Gaffney in his 1994 book The Corruption of Economics has described how most influential oligarchy in late nineteenth century America, the railroad barons exerted their manipulative power to preempt the possibility of any rent extracted from land use. Leading Economics scholars engaged in establishing the American Economic Association (AEA) were induced to change definitions and to initiate two-factor (capital and labour) neoclassical economics denying land and natural resources’ contribution in production process. To oppose and alienate George from the domain of economics had been the preoccupation to the founding members of the AEA that fetched a grand success.

Frederick Soddy, recipient of Chemistry Nobel Prize in 1921, considered economics a pseudoscience requiring a paradigm shift and offered an alternative perspective on economics, rooted in the laws of thermodynamics. Contrary to mainstream belief, economy used to draw energy from outside itself and thus incapable of generating infinite wealth. Sody’s critique has been furthered by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen in his magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971). Georgescu-Roegen considered the economy as a living system that used to draw from its environment valuable or low entropy matter and energy adjusted by equal quantity of polluting high entropy matter-energy back to the environment.

Classical economics was concerned about scarcity of savings as well as dangers of overconsumption. Thomas Malthus was a remarkable exception within the classical tradition who promoted the idea that underconsumption causes recession. Based on Malthusian conviction, J.M. Keynes came forward to reverse under-consumption and oversaving during the Great Depression of the 1930s in his The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. (1936) that government spending and subsidized consumer spending can compensate for “demand deficiencies”. Keynesian revolution aimed at long-term growth of national income through consumption, investment, incremental capital/output ratio without considering physical and energetic realities. An American economist Murray Rothband observed that Keynes “possessed the tactical wit to dress up ancient statist and inflationist fallacies with modern, pseudoscientific jargon, making them appear to be the latest findings of economic science.” Keynes’ misrepresented Say’s Law as “supply creates its own demand” as if it were a quotation from J.B. Say. Paul Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) had initiated the mathematization of economics in a grand scale that provided the power to confuse the outsiders along with the economists incapable to cope with “competitive inflation of rigour”. The novelty of Milton Friedman’s essay, “The Methodology of Positive Economics” (1953), was in innovating the immateriality of background assumptions. According to another main proponent of neoclassical school of economics Robert Solow, technology has been the determinant factor of economic growth. Subsequent research has observed that Solow has failed to assess the energy processes of consumption, transformation, and depletion, though these factors are inseparable from the growth of industrial production.

Thus the treadmill of production, founded on the eternal law of capitalist circulation: supply creates its own demand, drives the expansion of production and consumption synergistically. The zero-sum game has its obvious tolls on wretched teeming millions mostly of the “other” world. Andre Gunder Frank elaborated his earlier “Development of Underdevelopment” thesis in a 2001 paper based on multilateralism and entropy on how the structure, process and transformation of the world-system generate the new wealth and poverty of nations. Entropy is dispersed from the more “ordered” regions and sectors of the global world economy to other less “ordered” regions that are obliged to absorb the entropy dissipated in their direction by the more “ordered” one. Global biophysical transformation engenders localized stresses in the forms of coastal erosion, ice melt, and infertile land and deteriorating water sources. Thus fast liquefying of Arctic cryosphere, causes matching rise in sea-beds that will result in submerging of several small-island states in Pacific and Indian Ocean by the end of twenty-first century. The catastrophic ecological crises manifested by growing human strive for higher per-capita consumption, the only indicator of economic growth, by deploying ruthlessly limited resources stored in a finite and fragile planet. Thus the project to divert Economics from the road to flourish as a disciplined study of humans’ economic activities in the broader socio-ecological context to a mere vocational training equipped with quantitative tools had been completed. A “boutique” or more aptly, a “comprador” economics had elevated to full-swing marginalising political and methodological plurality. Margaret Thatcher’s famous assertion that ‘there is no alternative’(TINA) and Francis Fukuyama’s equally famous verdict of ‘End of History…’ trumpet the advent of a particular political and economic system as the final destination of humanity’s socio-cultural evolution.

The global financial crisis surfaced in 2000s, apparently as a consequence of sub-prime housing mortgage practices in USA, has its root in growing disjuncture between the real economy of production and the paper economy of finance. As early as in 1920s, Soddy argued that the financial system could increase the public and private debts and mix-up this expansion of credit with the creation of real wealth. But growth of production and growth of consumption imply growth in the extraction and final destruction of fossil fuels. The obligation to pay debts at compound interest could be fulfilled either by inflation or economic growth. But economic growth is fallaciously measured because it is based on undervalued exhaustible resources and unvalued pollution. The myth of unlimited economic growth has all along been justified with unrealistic assumptions and “evergreen” predictions. Vested interests from late nineteenth century American railroad oligarchy to vanguards of Washington consensus have promoted the pseudoeconomics quixotically empowered to dominate academics and policy. Foucauldian knowledge-power discourse reminds us that if the values and political implications underlying the “growth business-as-usual” do not ensure how to protect the society, we can refuse to accept their imperatives and develop alternative epistemology.

But there I was, last Friday, in this hotel room in Atlanta, a city pretending there’s no Depression, chewing my complimentary morning donut, and Today is telling us about the “new face of American poverty.”

“More than 49 million Americans now live below the poverty line and a number of them like the family you’re about to meet propelled into bankruptcy by a one-two punch of job loss and a catastrophic health crisis.”

Wow! US television finally grabs the Big Issue.

This white suburban family called the Kleins have lost their home to eviction. They’re completely broke, because one of their kids got a tumor in her face. They have no insurance so the $100,000-plus medical bills wiped them out.

They live with neighbors and they hoped to at least get their kids a couple pair of underwear as a Christmas gift.

But if you think America doesn’t give a crap about the cancerous growth of poverty, just keep watching: The Today reporter takes the white family to WalMart where the bubbly journalist gushes, “The wonderful people of WalMart opened up their stores and their aisles and their hearts. The store is your oyster, Michelle!”

Then some WalMartian PR person tells the bankrupt mom to address the issue of long-term unemployment, “Let’s go shopping!”

And you thought America was cold-hearted, just because the Republicans tried to block unemployment insurance this Christmas for three million families.

On their free shopping spree, the Kleins got laptops and a Kindle, and a big-ass TV and all the good things that WalMart can provide.

And if you think WalMart has shown how selfless and caring Americans are, just wait until you find out what the Today show is giving America’s desperate poor: Simply the best-est gift ever …

“We saved the best for last!” The reporter tells the Kleins that NBC is flying them to New York, “to be on the Today show, to be on our set with Matt Lauer and Ann Curry!”

Matt and Ann! Both of them! Well, I bet they wouldn’t do that in North Korea or Sweden! Only in America!

Mr. Klein is so happy he’s meeting Ann that he doesn’t seem care anymore that he lost his job at Ford Motor. He just has his family. In some other family’s house, of course. But that’s a detail.

And if you thought this was just some cheap publicity stunt by WalMart, dig this, Mr. Cynical: WalMart is going to pay for all the Klein’s medical bills for a full year! And to pay for it, WalMart’s 1.4 million employees will not have all their medical bills covered for the year. Now, that’s generosity!

(This heartwarming segment of the Today show about the Klein kids, by the way, is sponsored by — no points for guessing: WalMart.)

But then I thought: wait a minute. What about ObamaCare? Once the plan is in place, no American can be denied insurance, even someone with a tumor in their face.

Americans love to hate ObamaCare. But isn’t that more valuable to the Kleins than a TV screen with no house to put it in?

Now, many of my friends will be surprised to hear me say this, as I’ve been quite skeptical about the accomplishments of the Pope of Hope. But let’s admit that Barack Obama tried to save the Kleins from medical-bill devastation, that he is trying to get them some unemployment insurance, trying (if on sketchy terms) to save the auto industry, all in the face of resistance of America’s hatred of Socialist Government.

Maybe we don’t need Santa Claus. Maybe we need Anti-Claus: A skinny ‘Muslim’ from Kenya squirming down your chimney!

America’s problem seems to be that it can only be cruel 364 days a year. Christmas is that time of year when the United States of Scrooge takes a vacation from heartless profiteering and the nasty joy Americans get, that “I’m-not-one-of-those-losers” frisson.

Listen to Rick and Newt and Mitt and Michele and Ron and what you get is the Great American F***’em! They lost their jobs? F***’em! Their kid has a tumor and they don’t have health insurance? F***’em!

Unless, of course, it’s Christmas and you have to look at the tumor on TV. Then, it’s like, Someone buy them a big-screen television so we don’t feel bad.

Santa’s erstaz elf, Bill O’Reilly, keeps talking about the “War on Christmas.” Because one day a year he has to dress up in Good Will to All Men drag. He can deck his halls with bags of bullshit make-believe kindness.

The rest of the year, he’s jerking off while talking dirty to his horrified female producers and raking in millions from the yahoos who haven’t lost their jobs yet.

So that’s it: for me, no more chestnuts roasting on an open fire. My chestnuts have gone down with my Lehman bonds, anyway. I’m declaring war on Christmas.

Don’t like that, O’Reilly? Then eat my shorts — with cranberry sauce.

Surgery for kids with cancer, a house to live in that’s not a relatives’ basement, and a job making something other than “financial products”… These are rights, not gifts. They don’t come down the chimney, they come from a community that can set aside its bred-in-the-bone meanness for more than one day a year.

And to all a good night.

Merry, um, Festivus, from the Palast Investigative Team.

Karl Marx may not have referred to the 1% and the 99% when he wrote of those extremes in the 19th century, but they certainly capture this moment in the 21st. Americans appalled at minority domination of national wealth as they pay for endless wars, increasing inequality and vanishing public services have joined a rising global movement for democracy.

65% of the planet’s 7 billion people are poor, bringing the 21st century still closer to Marx’s words of the 19th. Humanity’s call for another world is growing louder and more insistent. The forces of reaction are working to smother that voice through their private governments and media but also through supposedly public and even progressive political circles.

In a particularly sad irony, a budding form of anarchic democracy in America grows through the “Occupy” movement, while an attempt at such governance in Libya has been crushed, at least temporarily. The NATO attack succeeded in obliterating a governing force that tried representing a majority of the Libyan people. While Gaddafi’s regime made many mistakes after its initial socialist phase, perhaps most seriously in re-aligning with the treacherous west, its Green Book attempt to create real and not simply representative democracy was laughed at by cynics but in line with anarchist dreams of power coming from collective will and not individual leadership. Many in the Occupy movement may not know what really happened in Libya, but under thought control exercised by agents of the 1% relatively few have any idea.

More important, growing numbers of people are learning that minority ruled society is the root cause of most problems facing humanity. That these problems grow more severe each day makes the increased demand for change both timely and ever more necessary. The Climate Change meetings in Durban that found the 1% ruling powers standing in the way of any change threatening their fanatic worship of private investment and belief in the market deity only showed more conclusively that democracy of the 99% must become reality to end the hypocritical sham that has gone by its name far too long.

Occupy Wall Street’s General Assembly urged “the people of the world…create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.”

These solutions are impossible under the domain of private capital’s 1%. The un-regulated markets of obsessive profit seeking are like un-protected sex. Even at their best they can produce unwanted results and at their worst they may produce terminal disease, which is what present global market forces have created. We cannot opt for a temporary remission via private profiteering which carries the disease; the 99% need to consider the abolition of minority dominated market forces and the beginning of democratic control of global resources, in the interest of all the earth’s inhabitants and not just a tiny group of multi billionaires. In an alleged modern, civilized, digitized society, it’s time we end stupid mythology about hard work earning people incredible sums of money that bring them the power of gods.

How do people come by such wealth? How many packages must they deliver, students must they teach, patrons must they serve, miles must they drive, wounds must they bandage, legal briefs must they submit, floors must they sweep, children must they raise, to end up with a billion dollars? Ten billion dollars?

What sense does it make to have one human living on millions of dollars a week while billions of humans live on less than five dollars a day?

The imperial rulers maintain dominance only by virtue of military might. Without massive murder power such as was exercised in Libya and is threatened in Syria and Iran, they would already be gone and as global opposition grows that power will soon not be enough to dominate the planet. Newer threats to powerful nations like China and Russia only show the near dementia of rulers nearing the end of their reign.

But the madness of the diminishing cult, with nuclear weapons at their disposal, threatens our future, just as humanity shows signs of coming together to create a different world of peace, social justice and protection for the environment that sustains all mankind. Leaving control of social wealth in private hands would be suicide for the human race.

Henry Ford once said, “It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” He was correct. We need to understand that system and transform it by creating federal, state and municipal public banks, owned, administered and investing according to the wishes of the people whose funds are held by these institutions. We cannot rely on some wealthy people investing according to moral principles unknown to most of their class. They should be taxed and their money democratically invested in the societies that created this wealth in the first place. We need to create a sensible maximum wage and a higher minimum wage that guarantees survival, with a social safety net that allows no one to go hungry, experience untended illness, or live without shelter.

There is far more than enough wealth to house, feed, clothe and benefit everyone, if we simply stop squandering that wealth on minorities who use it to perpetuate a system that is bringing us closer to social disaster. Capitalism is in a crisis which will get much worse before we make it better. In order to do that we need to end inequality and begin to recognize that the survival of one is dependent on the survival of all.

Happy New Year. 2012 could be a big one.

When I reflected on what I had witnessed and learned while researching in 120 countries (as well as at the World Bank and many UN agencies) and filming in 69 of them, I let commonsense be my guide. It led me to the conclusion that capitalism was not of itself the problem. It was the short-sighted and stupid way Western capitalism was managed.

Now I’ll put some flesh on that bone.

By the early 1970’s truly informed development experts were drawing attention to the fact that our one small planet was divided into two worlds – the Rich World containing about 20% of humankind (and known in development jargon as the North), and the Poor World containing about 80% of humankind (and known in development jargon as the South).

In the Poor World an estimated 15 million children under five were dying each year from malnutrition and related and easily preventable diseases such as diahorrea, measles and whooping cough – in a word poverty, abject poverty. And an estimated 300 million more were born brain damaged because of malnutrition in the wombs of their mothers. But those statistics told only a part of the story. The majority of the human inhabitants of Planet Earth were living on the margins of life, without some and in many cases all of the basic necessities for life – shelter, adequate nutrition, clean water, health care, education and work/job opportunities. On each and every continent I asked the poorest parents what was the one thing they most wanted. This was before the age of the mobile telephone and I expected many of them to say a television or some such gadget. What they all said in their various ways echoed one of the poorest Indian women. Her answer was, “Education for my children so they don’t have to live like animals as we do.”

The rich nations were creating their wealth by selling goods and services. It followed that if this wealth creating process was to have a sustainable future and Rich World citizens were to enjoy ever rising material standards of living as promised by their politicians, the global market place needed more and more consumers with the purchasing power to buy what the Rich World nations had to sell.

If the managers of Western capitalism (corporate chiefs, bankers and politicians) had not been short-sighted and stupid, they would have said to themselves something like the following. “If we don’t now invest in the development of the poor of the world and bring them progressively into the market place with purchasing power, we are going to run out customers in the numbers needed to buy what we have to sell in order to sustain our system.”

If the necessary investment had been made over 10, 15 and even 20 years, (it would have needed that amount of time in order to guarantee that the money and other development assistance provided could be absorbed and put to best use with minimum corruption), victory in the war against global poverty and underdevelopment – the only war that matters – would have been assured. To give just one example… The disastrous population drift from the rural areas where there was a future to the urban centres where there was not and is not a future for many of the drifters could have been halted and even reversed.

Making the investment needed on the necessary scale would have meant that the investing Rich World nations would not have grown so rapidly and their citizens would have had to accept a little less in the way of ever rising material standards of living, but that would have been a small price to pay for giving Western capitalism a sustainable future and all of our children wherever they live the prospect of a future worth having. (Whereas today they do not have a future worth having).

Instead of starting down the road to making capitalism work for the benefit of all in global terms, the system’s Western managers opted to keep things going by flooding the Rich World with credit cards to enable its citizens to live beyond their means and get deeper and deeper into debt. “I need” was replaced with “I want”. (My working class father used to say to me, “Boy, if we can’t afford it, we don’t look in the shop window.”)

There was bound to come a time when Rich World citizens simply could not afford to go on buying on the scale needed to keep Western consumer capitalism going.

Then, partly to fuel debt-driven consumer and government spending, the greed-driven, totally irresponsible bankers drove the final nail into Western capitalism’s coffin by playing their leveraging games, producing debt instruments with a face value of hundreds of trillions of U.S. dollars but which were not backed and supported by real assets. (A good friend of mine was the senior risk manager for one of the world’s biggest banks headquartered in London. She told me that for five years she and her team tried to warn top management that leveraging with Mickey Mouse instruments was creating a catastrophe, but top management didn’t want to listen. It was focused only on bonuses).

If Jeremy Clarkson had said that banking chiefs should have been taken out and shot in front of their families, I would have smiled and said to myself, “If only.”

And I would not have bailed out the banks with taxpayers’ money. I would have let them go bust. (The first rule of capitalism is supposed to be that if you get it wrong you go bust). But before making that decision public I (as prime minister) would have said to my people something like the following. “Don’t panic. The money we would have to put into bailing out reckless and irresponsible banks will instead be used to create a new national bank which, rather like the High Street banks of the old days, will exist only to serve the needs of their customers.”

There’s no question that banking chiefs were short-sighted, greedy and stupid, but… They were not the architects of what future historians will call the crash of Western capitalism. They, the architects, were the politicians who deregulated the banks and financial markets. The leading architect was Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. On 27 October 1986, she initiated the “Big Bang” in the City of London, the sudden deregulation of the banks and financial markets. In the name of “financial liberalism” she truly believed that markets would work better, more efficiently, if they were free of rules and restrictions. In her view millions of decisions made every day by traders in a free market would be better for all of us than decisions that had to be made with reference to rules and regulations drawn up by committees of the great and the good.

Though I might be exaggerating to make a point and may be misrepresenting her to some extent, she seemed to be saying, “We need not bother too much with our old industries and ways of creating wealth, the banks and the markets will do it for us.”

Events were to prove that she could not have been more naive and more wrong, but before they did American presidents starting with Ronald Reagan had followed her lead.

My understanding of the situation today can be summarized as follows. The debts of Western governments are so big that no Western country will be able to generate the growth and so the money needed to repay them. On that basis I can see only two scenarios for the future.

One is that in order to repay the debts, governments slash expenditure across the board, cutting, cutting and cutting back massively on budgets for everything including state pensions and social welfare benefits and services. Unemployment rises to unthinkable levels and living standards plunge to unacceptable levels. Eventually the citizens revolt and violence escalates. What passes for democracy is shut down and martial law is established. Orwell’s 1984 finally arrives. (Soon after Edward Heath ceased to be prime minister, my wife and I had lunch with him. I asked him what his biggest fear for the future was. I expected it to be related to global poverty because he had been a member of the Brandt Commission which studied it. His reply, calm in delivery and matter of fact in tone, was, “That Britain will become the first police state in the democratic world.”)

In the other scenario all debts, including mortgages on homes, are written off and we all start again.

By definition a re-start would have to be based on a rock-solid commitment to fairness with a real intention to make capitalism work for the benefit of all.

This idiot is in quite good company. American Martin Weiss is the founder of the Weiss Rating Agency (WRA). In his latest presentation he makes the following claims about his agency’s astonishing success in predicting economic disasters of the past 40 years, a claim which is confirmed by all the major American newspapers and economic journals.

Months in advance WRA warned about the S&L crisis of the 1980’s; the great insurance company failures of the 1990’s; plus the great “Tech Wreck” of the early 2000’s.

WRA was the only firm in the world to warn of the financial crisis of 2008 more than a year in advance, specifically naming nearly every major company that later collapsed.

Today Martin Weiss says this:

Barring a miracle, an historic, world-changing event is about to end the American way of life as we know it. This monumental event will plunge vast numbers of families into the nightmare of poverty, homeless and hunger. In a worst case scenario you will see soaring crime, the confiscation of property, the suspension of civil rights, and even the enforcement of martial law by the U.S. military.

The world-changing event he is anticipating is a decision by China to stop buying U.S. debt, which will mean, he says, that America will no longer be able to borrow money; and that, he adds, will see the beginning of “America’s Financial Doomsday”.

My own biggest fear which I have been expressing to friends in private for a number of years is that the unfolding economic crisis may take us all the way to World War 111. It could happen for two related reasons. One is the need of governments to deflect the attention of their own people away from the mess within. The other is the need to have an outside party to blame. There’s a case for saying that some American politicians are already setting up China for blame.

We shall see…

Footnote

European plans to bring in tough budget controls are irrelevant, even a farce. They are designed to stop the present unfolding catastrophe from happening again, but they won’t do anything to solve the present debt crisis. European leaders are shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Through the museum, community projects, fairs, workshops and media, CEDICAM educates the public and campesinos, or small scale farmers, about the history of the Mixteca’s land, belief systems, traditions, architecture and agriculture and how they can help remedy current problems. They promote the use of traditional and appropriate technologies (sustainable and affordable tech) such as reforestation, development of corn seeds through selective breeding, sustainable water and soil preservation techniques, green composting, and milpas, an organic agricultural system that produces large yields and mixes a variety of crops, usually including maize (corn), beans and squash. CEDICAM also works with groups such as Witness for Peace to share knowledge with visitors that can benefit communities in other parts of the world.

For 10 days in September I was a member of one of the delegations to Oaxaca organized by Witness for Peace (WfP). Our itinerary was loaded with experiences like our meeting at CEDICAM, focusing on global trade, food sovereignty, migration, indigenous rights and agro-ecology (the application of ecological principles to agricultural techniques). WfP is an international grassroots organization founded in 1983 in response to U.S. Government-supported violence in Nicaragua perpetrated by Contra soldiers. They advocate peace, justice and sustainable economies by changing harmful U.S. Government and corporate policies. The WfP Oaxaca office opened in the Summer of 2006. During this period state violence against striking teachers seeking living wages and improved working conditions led to many deaths and human rights abuses.

Carlin Christy and Tony Macias, our delegation’s WfP guides and interpreters, also shared a wealth of information about the histories of Mexico, WfP and corporate globalization as well as practical skills to improve our group’s cohesion and functionality such as anti-oppressive practice and consensus decision making. All of the delegates also had much knowledge and a diversity of experience to contribute to these discussions and to our conversations with Oaxacan farmers and activists.

As explained by Eleazar, Mixteca means “place of clouds” because long ago it was an environment with regular rainfall and lush vegetation. Today it’s one of the poorest regions in Mexico and one of the most eroded areas in the world. The importation of goats, sheep, pigs and construction methods by the Spanish led to mass deforestation and soil erosion. More recently, some farmers use chemical fertilizers, pesticides and machinery that damages and compacts soil leading to increased crop failures, water runoff and worsened erosion. Besides the ecological damage, a devastated local economy made worse by unjust free trade policies has forced many young farmers to emigrate. Eleazar and CEDICAM’s goal is to provide the community with hopeful alternatives to preserve the land and natural resources so that people don’t have to leave for the U.S. and elsewhere to support themselves and their families.

Before our arrival at CEDICAM we met with a variety of allied groups based in Oaxaca doing equally important and beneficial work on related issues but with differences in focus and approach. The first organization we visited was an NGO called Services for an Alternative Education (EDUCA). According to Miguel Angel Vasquez de la Rosa, a founding member of EDUCA, their focus is on two main goals, democratization of Oaxacan communities and the defense of rights of disenfranchised Oaxacans. One of their projects is “Our Rights Are Born From Our Roots” a campaign to train and organize communities through forums and media on the issue of rights; namely, self-determination, rights to land and resources, political rights of women and rights to education.

Another project, “The Initiative for Peace and Justice”, is a partnership with allied groups to create a truth commission for state-sanctioned crimes against activists. Miguel also shared recent data about Oaxaca State: its population is about 3.8 million people, it has over 500 municipalities, 16 indigenous groups and 8 major geographical regions. It’s the second poorest Mexican state after Chiapas with high child malnutrition and maternal death rates and approximately 76% living in poverty. The majority of work in Oaxaca is connected to agriculture and many farmers lost their livelihoods after the implementation of NAFTA in the 90s. He estimates that today about 60% of youth entering the job market are unemployed, forcing many to emigrate or enter the black market.

The next morning we visited Zaira de la Rosa Jiminez, Martha Miranda and Pete Noll of Puente a la Salud Comunitaria, a group promoting food sovereignty through cultivation and distribution of amaranto, or amaranth crops. Amaranth is a plant related to quinoa and is indigenous to Asia and Mesoamerica (in fact, it is one of Mesoamerica’s oldest crops). Puente views amaranth as an ideal crop to help overcome the problem of malnutrition. It’s higher in protein than rice, wheat and corn, contains more fiber and less carbohydrates and is gluten-free. Amaranth is a practical and affordable crop because it’s highly drought-resistant, easily harvested, grows quickly and is easy to cook. After having had a chance to try amaranth in the forms of breakfast cereals, snack bars, and drinks, I would add that it’s also delicious.

That afternoon we met with farmers in the milpa system where the amaranth plants are grown with corn, zucchini, and pata de leon, a type of red flower used in Day of the Dead celebrations. At the end of the day we travelled to the library in Mazaltepec to meet with town authorities, campesinos, mothers, and their families. We discussed our respective backgrounds and their struggles as a community including protecting crops from GMOs, inability to compete with cheap subsidized corn from the U.S., and how that has contributed to economic problems forcing people in the community to emigrate.

Following Puente, we joined a large contingent from Red Autonoma para la Soberania Alimentaria (RASA), an autonomous network of people working for food sovereignty through training workshops, urban gardening and sharing of knowledge and resources. Representatives including Aerin Dunford, Lydia Zarate Ubieta and Jorge Narvaes Perez showed us some of the current projects of RASA members such as mushroom cultivation, a rooftop garden, a cornfield and apricot orchard on the city outskirts, and even invited us into the home of some of the RASA members where we had a feast featuring some of the best tortillas and oyster mushrooms I’ve ever tasted.

From there we returned to the central district of Oaxaca City where we met with Wilfred Mendoza, a member of the board of directors of the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juarez, Oaxaca (UNOSJO). They’re a prominent social organization which promotes sustainable economies, self-determination and respect for indigenous culture through media, technical assistance, fairs, educational workshops and conflict resolution for rural landowners. Wilfred sees agro-ecology as an ancient technology whose resurgence is essential for food sovereignty and a fundamental part of defending indigenous rights, a view shared by Beatriz Salinas and Esperanza Pilar Chagoya Minguer of the Center for Indigenous Rights Flor y Canto, whom we visited the next day.

Flor y Canto is a human rights center that promotes indigenous rights with a focus on women’s empowerment and the protection of natural resources through education, denouncement of rights violations, legal defense, and support of allied groups such as the People’s Committee for the Defense of Water. They see an extreme polarity between indigenous cultures that care for the earth and a capitalist system that commodifies and destroys the earth. Many laws are dictated by money and capital so one of Flor y Canto’s roles is to create spaces where solidarity and humanity are respected. By helping indigenous communities obtain water through well construction projects and legal defense of water rights, they’re also addressing the problem of emigration. The national water commission ConAgua charges for water at price levels beyond what many campesinos can afford. During drought years such as in 2006, waves of migrations occurred because farmers couldn’t access enough water to irrigate crops.

After our delegation’s meeting with CEDICAM, we travelled further out to the countryside to San Pedro Coxcaltepec where we had an opportunity to stay with a local family of subsistence farmers dealing with many of the issues we learned about throughout the previous week. While there we had an opportunity to speak to town elders, learn about different aspects of the local culture, learn more about the work involved in managing a milpa, as well as participate in the work by shoveling and mixing green compost. This was an especially valuable segment of the delegation because it gave us a glimpse into the daily experience of Oaxacan campesinos, revealed a sense of the beauty and challenges of life in the Mixteca, and gave us time to bond with the family. It’s one thing to read about struggles of farmers or even hear about them through allied advocacy groups, but to meet campesinos who express their concerns directly while sharing their hospitality (as we also did with Puente and RASA) is an empathic experience creating a personal connection to the issues we came to Oaxaca to learn about. This will undoubtedly inspire all of us in the delegation to make use of the knowledge passed on to us in our own lives and to share it with others. Given the current political and economic situation in America and most of the world, strategies for food sovereignty, education and community organizing will be increasingly important for all of us.

Two weeks after returning from the delegation I was at the Occupy Seattle demonstration where I had a chance encounter with a protester attending the rally because he was “tired of getting screwed by government.” I told him I was tired of everyone getting screwed by transnational corporations and financial institutions backed up by corrupt governments. He went on to say “Obama cares more about Mexicans than the American people,” to which I replied “I recently got back from Mexico where I heard firsthand accounts of how our government and Wall Street harms Mexican workers as much as American workers if not more. They wouldn’t need to migrate if they could support their families back home.” Rather than argue, he muttered “Well, they’ve been screwing all of us in the 99%…” before wandering back into the crowd, which wasn’t a bad outcome but sort of a letdown. I was ready to help him understand in greater detail how and why immigration and mass unemployment are both symptoms of neo-liberal policies at the core of economic crises in America, Mexico and around the world. It’s possible he simply didn’t feel like debating, but perhaps someone with a common but erroneous view that Mexicans (presumably immigrants) are a source of their problems was, in fact, with a few words and widened context, able to accept that they’re as much victims of an unjust system as ourselves.

Amidst the masses in Westlake Park, consisting of a diversity of ages, ethnicities, and socio-economic backgrounds, I visualized the Occupation Movement strengthening their solidarity, not only within separate communities but with the global 99% uniting against the wealthiest 1% who benefit most from the current system and are the true source of the most pressing social-economic-environmental problems of our time. If this were to happen we might stand a chance to ensure a better world for future generations. La lucha sigue! (The struggle continues!)

The above story sums up the actions of politicians thus far as they respond to the economic crisis engulfing capitalism worldwide.  The politicians are unwilling, unable, or both, to tackle the causes of the problem which are the lack of demand as a result of unemployment, cuts in real wages and soaring energy prices, with profits rising by 700% since June 2011. Instead, they continue to pump more and more billions into the banks, with the gap between the poor and the super-rich that lies at the core of the problem forever widening.

Jeffrey Sachs, a well-known American economist, interviewed on BBC radio 4 Today programme (October15, 2011) about his book The Price of Civilisation, made some very telling remarks:

International capital at the top is mobile, and is running circles around our government: this is the essence of globalisation.

Of course, this clearly implies that democracy itself is being subverted and corrupted.  The ordinary citizen is no longer able to effect change through the ballot box.  Is it any wonder that people are taking to the streets in the U.S and Europe, in actions that mirror the Arab spring to demand that they should be heard?

He continued:

One major Chairman of the Board of one of the world’s largest companies put it to me accurately a few months ago when he said to me: You have to understand that the big companies do not feel any national loyalty anymore, we are beyond that, we can pay ourselves gargantuan compensation packages that are offensive to the social norms of the host country because we do not feel part of the host country anymore

There you have it; judge the bosses of these global corporations by what they say and do.

He praised Northern European countries thus:

The countries that have done the best [under globalisation] are the social democracies of Northern Europe. They tax themselves heavily but then governments really perform, it is honest, it is not corrupted, and delivering services that the public want, and it is creating and ensuring an inclusive society, not one that is divided between the very top and the rest.

It is clearly possible for fairness, fair taxes, social justice and capitalism to exist together; more than that, these attributes are good for the economy too.  It also does not consign a large number of people to the scrapheap of the unemployed with its attendant misery and its detrimental effect on community cohesion.  Norway, for example, has an unemployment rate of 3.6%, compared to the U.S. — 9.1%, the UK — 8.1%.  All of that and the Scandinavian countries also have one of the best welfare provisions in the western world.

The demonstrations and the resistance worldwide to the immorality and the policies of governments in cahoots with global corporations and the “moneymen” are gaining in strength, and will eventually force politicians to address the real question; namely, that of reforming and controlling this corrupt form of capitalism.

He hoisted her a little higher on his back. …

If only Mother had followed Sister’s counsel about the pumice stone—or had allowed Sister to use the stone on her (and to trim her long toenails, as well!)—her calloused heels would not be chafing his ribs and hips through the thin fabric of his summer yukata.

But, she had always been a stubborn, proud woman; and in her youth she had been considered a bijin—a beauty—who had held her head high among the courtesans—the first wife of the Lord’s First Minister, with her own retinue of servants in the apartments near the Daimyo’s own.

But, that was long ago, and he could hardly remember now, as he carried her, like a sack of rice on his back, up the winding hill, this hot and humid and forlorn day.

Crows cawed above, as if in warning. For what? More calamities to come? Could there be any more in these wretched times? Even Nature had turned against the land, with earthquakes and typhoons rattling and lashing the little wooden homes and shrines, scattering them like chopsticks, and even the stone ojizo that guarded the children’s graves—even these small and tender Buddhas were cracked like eggs.

Everything changed when the wars began, and now his childhood seemed a dream he dared not, for the sake of sanity, indulge.

What had his father done to lose his place among the ministers—what errant word or glance, or mis-advice had caused him to lose favor? Hadn’t he chanted the Lotus Sutra every morning and every evening to secure his family’s place in the Pure Land?

Posh! What nonsense! Yorifumi thought now. So much mumbo-jumbo—incantations to the wind!

Crows cawed, and he half-smiled, half-grimaced at the rumors spread in the villages that even the crows were spies now, that they had been trained to see and report transgressions—and special handlers could decode their messages!

He felt his mother stirring on his back, felt her small breath a little cooler on his neck, knew she was awakening again.

“Son, son… why are you taking me up this hill? I know where we are going! Let me rest. Let me pass water, Yori-kun. Do not shame your mother!”

So he put her down in a shady spot on the trail and he turned his eyes away as she crouched, passed water, wiped herself with some leaves.

“Let us go back,” she said softly. “Not up the hill.”

“There is contagion in the village,” he explained again. “The children are dying… and the old people. … It is as I told you. … As we ascend, the air will clear, you can breathe deeply again, and the clean air will purify your lungs and make you well.”

“I am not well with this world, Son. … And with the lies we tell ourselves… and others.”

He looked into the blackness of her eyes, and felt himself falling into a dark and bottomless well. “I cannot rest too long, Mother. Or, I shan’t be able to go on.”

“Rest, then. Rest long.”

He crouched beside her. Gently he said, “Come, Mother. Climb on my back now. My legs are not so strong as they once were. I, too, feel the weight of these sad years. We must do what we must do.”

His legs were strong enough, but his back ached. Decades of bending over to plant the tender rice stalks, decades of pulling carts like a rich man’s ox, had bent his back and tightened the muscles in his legs.

Meekly, like a child, dutifully, as one who has seen better days, his mother climbed on her son’s back. “Oi!” he cried as he straightened as much as he could. Then, one straw zori after the other, he dug into the upward trail.

2.

Once he had dreamt of being a scholar, studying the sacred texts, decoding the mysteries. Now, every nerve and muscle in his 40-year old body strained under the weight, in the heat, as he proceeded steadily, surefootedly, uphill.

He remembered the lessons of his school days–the golden days of Court and castle–before the clans had broken the peace and plunged the world into hell. The crows cawed, and he heard his teacher’s voice in his mind:

“Rising with first light, the common people wash their faces, gargle water, then bow in six directions—east, then west; south, then north; above, and then below. They make obeisance to the six directions, praying that no misfortune will come from them.

“But Lord Buddha taught us how to bow to Truth; and, behaving wisely, and with virtue, that we could thus prevent misfortune.” The Scholar had turned his gentle eyes on him, nodded his glabrous head. “Yori-kun, can you tell the class the difference between the common man’s understanding and Lord Buddha’s teaching?”

He rose, and, in spite of himself, he felt a little pride, for he had thought about the difference all that evening before when he had read the lesson. “It is the same as when the Compassionate One spoke to Ananda, his favorite disciple; when, near dying, he said, ‘Be a lamp unto yourself.’”

“Expatiate, young sir.”

The other students honored him now, honored him with their attention. “The common people,” he continued, “put their faith in rituals—cleansing themselves and bowing to the six directions. … They think strength lies outside of themselves; they hope to placate the gods and demons. … But, the true disciple knows—this world is an illusion. … Fortune and misfortune are two sides of the coin. The discriminating mind is constantly dividing. … But the mind that is enlightened sees the wholeness of the moment—even as it’s passing. That mind perceives the truth of transitoriness. Its strength is its integrity-honed clarity.”

Even the venerable Scholar could not suppress a smile. And he—the fourteen-year old prodigy—wondered where the words had come from. He had never spoken so eloquently before, never thought such thoughts before. The classroom hushed in silence. …

“Yori-kun,” griped his mother now, “I am tired. Let us rest again.”

“Not yet, Mother.”

“Did you bring the mung beans?” she asked him. “Did you bring the onigiri?”

He reached into the pouch at his belt and handed her mung beans and a rice ball filled with dried fish over his shoulder. Soon, she wanted water, so he handed her the gourd at his belt and she gulped twice noisily. She was quiet for a while and he thought she slept, but soon she was murmuring to herself. “I know where we are going. My own son is taking me, my second son, now that my first son has died in the wars.”

“That was long ago, Mother.”

“No…, it was yesterday,” she said. And then she slept.

3.

He had watched his wife wrap the onigiri rice balls with dried seaweed and a little vinegar in the first light of dawn. Neither of them had slept well, knowing what must happen.

“There is no other way,” she had told him yesterday evening. “It has all led up to this… since the edict.”

They had discussed it before, two months earlier, when the edict had been published and the literate men had read it and discussed it, then broken the news to their wives.

“Fumiko is with child,” his wife had said. “It is either grandmother or the baby. Our daughter has had two sons already, one still-born. If she has a girl baby now. …”

She did not need to finish. In adjacent provinces, hunger and starvation had spread like wildfires, parents had begun to smother the girl babies. Now, hunger lurked in the eyes of the watchers in his own village. Their hollow, sallow cheeks reproached the elderly: why do you cling to the tatters of life like withered leaves on a cloven trunk? No one escaped the watchers.

That was the stark choice. … And if not his daughter’s baby girl, then someone else in the village. There was no longer food enough for all, especially since the taxes took so much for war.

That was the essence of the edict they called “Solving the Poor.” He wondered what minister of the Court, what word-mincer, what officious, sycophantic imbecile had dreamed up such a title? Not, “Solving Poverty”—ending the wars and the taxation that took the best of their labors to give it to the courtiers and superfluous ministries, and then to feed the soldiers who no longer worked in the paddies or fished the seas and rivers. “Solving the Poor,” they called it! By destroying them!

He watched the bandy-legged man descend the trail above him. The man’s face was grim, hard-set, his eyes fixed. He thought he recognized him from years before—someone from another village. But the man would not acknowledge him, would not acknowledge anyone. “He and I are the same man,” Yorifumi thought now. “He has done his work already… and I am nearly done.” The man’s rigid expression chilled him.

A cool wind blew through the bamboo copse at the side of the trail, rustling and clicking the tall stalks. When he was a child, his mother had told him, “If an earthquake comes, go to the bamboo copse, for the roots are knitted together there, underneath, where we can’t see them. The earth may crack around the copse, but there the earth is sewn together. There… is safety.”

But no place was safe in the days of the marauders. The soldiers invaded all the refuges. Minamoto or Taira—it did not matter what they called themselves, whether they fought for the Lord of the allied provinces or against them. All the earth quaked under the war horses’ hooves.

Across the western sea, in the land of Ch’in, in ancient times, they had fought four hundred years. … How long would the wars last now, he wondered. …

“Son, I am tired,” his mother murmured. “Let us rest again.”

“We are almost there, Mother. … At the resting place.”

Bamboo could knit their long, green fingers reaching for the sky—but men could not! No bamboo stalk begrudged another’s height or heft… but men made wars for straws.

“Another onigiri,” his mother begged now.

“Soon, Mother, soon.”

He had asked his wife to add a little rice wine and the last of the dried fish they had. He had hoped the wine would make his mother sleepy. And the fish… because it was the last they had!

Now the crows were circling and cawing. He remembered when he had come upon the hanged man in the tree, how the crows had perched on his shoulders, and how they ate the man’s eyes like a jellied delicacy.

The scrawny stranger was a runaway from another village, another province. Now he swung and turned slowly, suspended from a branch of cryptomeria. They learned later that he had murdered his girl baby. And then his wife. And then went mad.

He set his mother down upon the ground. She could barely stand on her spindly legs. He turned her to look at him, away from the precipice. Looking beyond her, he saw the tattered rags of the corpses.

How beautiful she had been in that other world—before the wars, before the devastation! How proud and dignified his father had been before losing favor at the Court, before his seppuku.

And now her hair was gray and patchy, and her skin bronze and leathery.

“Think not that this world is meaningless and filled with confusion,” the Scriptures taught. “Taste the way of Enlightenment in all the affairs of this world.”

She stood at arm’s length from him, sad and frail as a scarecrow. She sniffled and smiled weakly at him, understanding.

He meant to touch her shoulder gently, as he had when he was a boy. He could not do what had been ordained—edicts be damned.

He bowed to her, touched her gently to reassure her, touched her gently as a falling leaf alighting on her shoulder.

But she fell over backwards, tumbling down the ravine, breaking her neck as she fell. The crows swooped up and down in a storm of wings.

His knees buckled under him on the trail, and he hit the hard ground with his bony rump. He heaved for air. Then the floodgates of his tears were opened, and could not be closed.

London calling to the faraway towns
Now that war is declared — and battle come down
London calling to the underworld
Come out of the cupboard, all you boys and girls

— The Clash

To all those British intelligencia who attributed the recent riots that rocked the streets of London, Birmingham, Bristol, Gillingham, Nottingham, Manchester and Liverpool to hooligans, you’re as wrong as the myriad free enterprise economists who swore we had nothing to fear from a deregulated marketplace.  You’re as wrong as the killing of an innocent man.  You’re as wrong as holding the poor accountable for the errors of the elite.  You’re as wrong as an economy that creates an ever-widening gap between the haves and have-nothings.

Prime Minister David Cameron finds fault with everyone but the policies of his ruling party or indeed the increasingly conservative policies of his predecessors in the opposition.

In the prevailing world of British politics, entrenched poverty does not fit into the equation of civil unrest.  It has nothing to do with thirteen million impoverished citizens but rather to do with discipline in the schools.  It has nothing to do with low wages and rising unemployment but rather to do with excessive tolerance for aberrant behavior.  It has nothing to do with the deprivation of ethnic minorities and everything to do with moral depredation.

As income inequality rises to levels unprecedented in the modern era, Mister Cameron promises a crackdown on the rising turpitude of the ungrateful poor in Britain’s booming slums and the polite society applauds as if to acknowledge a fine golf shot.

What the Prime Minister and his colleagues are desperately trying to deny is the relationship between the riots in England and the events in Cairo, Tripoli, Damascus and Athens.  The combination of inequity, inequality and poverty is a potent brew that leads inevitably to civil unrest.  The only difference is a matter of degree.

London is calling and Washington should be listening.  By every measure the circumstances are worse in America than in Britain.  The poor are poorer, the disparity between the rich and the rest is greater, the social safety net is less intact and the burden of poverty falls even greater on minorities.

Everywhere across the globe the tide of suffering rises and governments have decided that the only solution is to shift the burden downward.  The European Union has become an enforcement mechanism for an age of austerity.  Budgets for relief of the afflicted and assistance to the poor are slashed to protect the corporate profit margin.  In America a presidential candidate complains that the poor do not pay income taxes.  Convinced by their own propaganda machine that the poor are unworthy leaches on society, legislatures in Florida and elsewhere order drug testing of to qualify for unemployment insurance.  Increasingly draconian laws are passed to further stigmatize immigrants at the bottom of the economic spectrum.

Blame the victim has become the mantra of the financial elite, passed down to the working ignorant, spreading like a plague on the nation.

When we have punished the poor all that we can, when we have pushed the once thriving middle class into poverty, when we have evicted families from their homes, when we have forced the family business into bankruptcy, when we have stripped the undocumented of all rights and deported as many as we can, only then will we begin to realize we have been duped.

Civil unrest is the last recourse and the natural consequence of austerity.

Fear not.  The authorities are prepared for this contingency.  Stripped down security forces will be mobilized to protect gated communities.  Violence will be contained in the poor neighborhoods.  Slums will burn.  Crowd control will become increasingly brutal.  Blood will flow on the streets of poverty.  Violence will beget violence in a vicious circle of disorder and ruin.

As in Britain, whoever is president will decry the decay of moral fiber and pledge to fight gangs and criminal elements to restore law and order.

There will be no more discourse on economic policy.  There will be no more talk of universal healthcare.  There will be no more protests against job exportation, free trade agreements or deregulation of industry or financial markets.  We will dutifully elect leaders who promise to crack down on lawlessness.  Our elections will become contests on who can project ever-greater toughness.  We will look for someone to play hardball with the unruly masses.

The erosion of civil rights and civil liberties that began long before September 2001 will continue to accelerate.  The right to privacy is the first casualty.  City streets and public squares will be under fulltime surveillance.  Telephone conversations and communications media will be monitored.  The right to speak freely will come under attack.  The right to assemble in protest will be relegated to obscure and closely guarded locations far from public access where the eyes of the corporate media never travel.

There will be no more mass protests against wars of choice and wars for oil as more and more of our sons and daughters line up to fight – not out of patriotism but as the only means of escaping destitution at home.

For all the unrest, for all the violence and destruction, there will be no revolution.  The government of the United States will not be threatened.  Unlike Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, there are no overlords of justice that will come to our aid.  We the people will stand helpless before the most powerful government in the history of the world.

We will rise up and we will be beaten down.  We will rise again and the government’s response will go beyond what any democratic state can bear.  What then?

What is happening before our eyes is that the governments of the world in concert with their sponsors in the corporate empire have devised a plan to revise the social order.

It has taken me longer than it should have to imagine what the end game of the new world order looks like.  The corporate mind is unscrupulous and greedy but it is not ignorant or foolish.  I have speculated that corporations were so fixated on short-term profit that they refused to see the long-term consequences of their actions.  By destroying the working middle class they were eliminating the very consumers on which they depend.

But it seems to me they have discovered a new consumer class.  Because of the sheer numbers in China and India, they can prosper for decades without a working consumer force.  They intend to replace the working middle class in Europe and America with a management middle class in Asia.

It is the only way it makes sense.  It is a plan laden with risk and it demonstrates an incredible disdain for working people.  It is risky enough depending on the stability of a corrupt democracy in India and an authoritarian state in China.  It is even more risky to create a permanent class of the working poor in the democracies of Europe and America.  There will be pushback.

In the end, their plan for a corporate world will fail because the spirit of self-determination, the desire for freedom and the yearning for democracy will prevail.  We will ultimately press our cause at the ballot box.  Despite all the technology and resources mobilize to control our minds, we will overcome.  Whether it takes a decade or a hundred years, we will prevail because we are on the right side of history.

The larger story of Canaraan is tightly linked to its neighbor, camp Corail, once touted as the very model for the international community’s humanitarian effort in Haiti.  The Corail experiment, and its dismal consequences, is well documented in a recent Rolling Stone article: In short, several thousand earthquake victims were relocated from urban Port-au-Prince to temporary shelters planted in an empty wasteland some distance north of the city.  Marked by the inefficiency, confusion, and high-handedness emblematic of Haiti’s stalled reconstruction effort, the Corail ‘model camp’ did not go as planned, leaving transplanted families far from economic activity and at the mercy of flooding, landslides, and hurricanes.  It is widely recognized as a failure.

Yet any major building project, even an ultimately unsuccessful one such as Corail, offers hope of something to those who have nothing, and soon enough Corail was surrounded by the sprawling series of unplanned settlements now known collectively as Canaan or Canaraan.  Like Corail, Canaraan residents are vulnerable to wind and water and find themselves cut off from the economic life of the city.  But lacking Corail’s official designation as a camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs), Canaraan residents are routinely dismissed as mere ‘squatters’ unworthy of assistance however pressing their need.  Ignored by both the Haitian government itself, and the 3,000+ international NGOs which function like a de facto shadow government, President Martelly’s visit to Canaraan was thus both a validation of  resident’s existence and a sign that perhaps their luck was about to change.

So far, at least, it has not.  Months after the visit, Canaraan is without signs of progress or construction, and residents’ former optimism is increasingly guarded, if not abandoned outright.  The future of textile factories in Canaraan remains a question without an answer, but it is worth asking why powerful actors, both Haitian and international, continually present them as a cure-all for Haiti’s many ills.  Factory projects have been a staple of USAID projects for a generation, and enjoy the prominent and high-profile support of figures such as Bill Clinton and Ban Ki Moon.  The Factory Solution predates the earthquake, and has not been shaken by it.  It now represents the single most significant international effort to impact the economic lives of Haitian people.

One need not dig too deep to find the dark side to this proposed answer to Haiti’s problems.  To make way for construction, for example, Canaraan families would be displaced from the flatlands into uncertain housing on the same treeless hills where landslides killed 23 people just two months ago.  It is unclear how many of the residents of the sprawling camp will find employment in the proposed industrial complex, but certainly fewer than the many tens of thousands of  people who currently live there. Even for those fortunate enough to obtain work, foreign owned textile factories in Haiti have developed a notorious reputation for unsafe conditions, workplace intimidation, union-busting, and wages so shockingly low that it is virtually impossible for even a small family to rely on them for survival. (Wages amount to approximately US $3 a day for textile labor, an in depth report on labor conditions in Haiti can be found here).  In this environment of kickbacks and sexual harassment, where nearly all employees labor without benefit of union representation or health insurance, the prospects for Canaraan residents will likely remain grim even if the President’s promises come true.

This is not to condemn all factories out of hand. Factory work is not inherently a social evil.  In many societies, including our own, factory labor has provided a pathway out of poverty.  For their part, residents in Canaraan express a desire for jobs above all else, and are even willing to accept eviction from their homes for factories that everyone knows will refuse to pay a subsistence wage.

Yet Canaraan residents’ desire for factory work must be understood against a backdrop of economic and political forces which have left Haiti’s poor strikingly boxed-in on all sides by bad options.  Physically, the choice between overcrowded slums, flood-prone plains, and denuded hillsides have left Canaraan residents perilously exposed to danger, whether they decide to remain in the city or flee to its outskirts.  Likewise, decades of US-driven trade policy has left families with few meaningful economic choices except factory work, effectively selling their labor to northern businesses at bargain basement prices.

Such a narrowing of options is not an accident.  It is the intentional result of express U.S. foreign policy.  It may come as a surprise to many Americans that the weight and prestige of their nation’s diplomacy was thrown into an effort to thwart raising Haiti’s minimum wage above 31¢ an hour, but this is precisely the sort of foreign machination that Haitians have been forced to live with for decades.  U.S. diplomatic cables, recently exposed by the group Wikileaks, detail the extent of this meddling, in which US muscle was engaged to sabotage parliamentary efforts to raise wages to a level capable of supporting dignified existence.

Against this backdrop, Canaraan residents’ approval of their President’s message emerges as a rational response to a set of artificially constrained options.  A house on a landslide-prone hill is preferable to a tarp on a flood-prone plain; likewise, a factory’s starvation wages are preferable to none at all.  And what other options are there?  Flooded with highly subsidized foreign food products, Haitians have watched the decimation of their agricultural sector.  Forced to open borders to ravenous (and sometimes predatory) foreign competitors, Haiti has seen its domestic enterprises left stunted.  As a result, the economic policies of the world’s powerful have effectively pushed Haiti’s poor into an ever narrowing chute — the only escape being into the arms of US, Canadian, or Korean textile corporations and their cut-rate sub-contractors in Haiti.  And with the wage increase successfully neutralized, it’s now impossible to earn a living even at that.

Yet beneath that surface enthusiasm, Canaraan residents voice a complex mix of hope and resignation, stoicism and anger, which is every bit as complicated as the geopolitical forces presently at work upon them.  Derided by the powerful as opportunists and squatters, Canaraan residents’ most simple acts of daily life — planting seeds for a dozen stalks of corn on a small plot of land, rebuilding the tarp roof of a Lutheran church, selling goods at market to send children to school — seem like acts of defiance against a global economic order determined to reduce people to a state of dependence.

No one, perhaps not even President Martelly himself, really knows whether the factory project will ever actually materialize, whether its promised employment will allow an escape from poverty, or if, instead, it will prove as illusory as countless other promises made to camp residents by politicians, diplomats, NGOs, and the international community.  But one thing is clear, until the powerful actors presuming to decide Haiti’s future put the autonomy, dignity, and well-being of Haiti’s poor majority at the center of reconstruction efforts, instead of simply instrumentalizing them as a pool of cheap labor, Canaraan families will not be able to break out of the trap of poverty, foreign factories or not.

A recent Wall Street Journal article titled “In Debt Collecting, Location Matters” reveals how companies trying to collect overdue bills can “shop around for the best places to bring their claims.”

The article details what debt collectors look for when choosing a small claims court; the ability to pursue as much of a debtor’s assets as possible, a sympathetic judge and, get this, a car-dominated landscape. The WSJ explains, “Decatur Township [an Indianapolis suburb] has become the preferred courthouse for lawyers who collect soured debt on behalf of medical providers, according to Pam Ricker, who has managed the court’s operations for more than 25 years. The township has no hospitals. Ms. Ricker says a lack of public transportation discourages many defendants from showing up in court, resulting in automatic wins for debt collectors.”

Somewhere along the way debt collectors realized that people who can’t afford to pay their medical bills are more likely to be car-less and thus less able to attend a small claims court far from any bus service. Apparently, these soulless debt collectors care little that those without a vehicle are probably less able to pay their medical bills.

Of course, Decatur Township’s medical collection gambit is an extreme example of how a car-dominated landscape exacerbates inequities, but private car transport also places a greater financial burden on lower income folks in many other ways.

All other forms of land transportation are much more accessible. Shoes, a bike, or a metro pass are cheaper than a car, which costs on average $8,500 to own and operate annually.

Though they drive less, lower income folks are more likely to live on heavily trafficked streets/neighborhoods. Increased car noise and pollution leads to various ills, including higher rates of asthma and cancer. The car contributes to ill health in other ways. As an important means for the wealthy to assert social dominance, the private car heightens cultural inequities and inequality is an increasingly recognized negative health determinant.

The private car has made it possible for the wealthier to live far from the poor (or anyone else without an automobile). Partly to keep out poor people and black folks, suburban counties such as Decatur Township have failed to invest in public transit. In Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism & New Routes to Equity Robert Bullard describes how resistance to “urban” infiltration constrained the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) to serving two of the Atlanta region’s ten counties. When Cobb County voted against joining MARTA the unofficial slogan was “Stop Atlanta.” And so, MARTA is filled with lines that bypass wealthy suburban areas or terminate at their boundaries.

Travelling across the U.S. by Greyhound bus to research an ‘anti-car road trip story’ we experienced what appeared to be race/class-inspired transit planning. In the suburbs of New Orleans buses ended their routes abruptly at the edge of municipalities as if the asphalt itself had run out. Less subtle than this relay race bus tag, some highways are made in ways that block buses. In New York, for instance, the overpasses on the Jones Beach Parkway from Manhattan to Long Island were built deliberately low to stop busses from passing beneath and reaching the beaches.

The desire to avoid living with or near blacks stimulated much of U.S. suburban expansion. Although largely understood as a post-Interstate Highway system phenomenon, the white exodus from the city began earlier. The most famous example is the meticulously planned suburb of Levittown, Long Island. In 1953 it had a population of 70,000 — all of whom were white.

In many places the movement of better off whites from the city has diminished the property taxes required to fund social services such as schools, libraries and community centers. Spatial separation enabled by the automobile strengthens the disadvantages of race and class in other ways. Jobs are increasingly located on the outskirts, which is disadvantageous to low-income car-less individuals who often cannot reach these jobs by public transit. People of color are hardest hit since they are less likely to own a car and twice as likely to utilize non-automotive modes of transport.

While increasing inequities the private car also shields drivers from “undesirables”. When we were in Portland an Oregonian columnist writing about street youth shared a reader’s letter detailing the lengths he went to avoid the homeless. In the morning he entered work through the underground parking. At lunch he eschewed the nearby restaurants and slipped into his car to avoid panhandlers. Finally, he used the parkade exit to avoid street people on his way home from work. “Many of us, myself included,” a businessman from Northeast Portland e-mailed the paper, “drive garage (home) to garage (downtown) to garage (home) and never leave the building because of this [street youth] problem. …It’s easier just not to deal with it.”

For the well-to-do, private cars have long been a way to avoid social problems. The automobile’s capacity to create social distance en route appealed to early car buyers. Prominent auto historian, James J. Flink, remarked, “the automobile seemed to proponents of the innovation, to afford a simple solution to some of the more formidable problems of American life associated with the emergence of an urban industrial society.”

Overwhelmed by capitalist culture and enmeshed with unions tied to automobile production, socialist parties and movements have largely failed to challenge car-oriented transport for exacerbating inequities. Much the same could be said for an environmental movement highly dependent on rich philanthropists.

We need to face the truth. By design, urban areas liberated from the danger, pollution and ecological devastation of the private automobile enjoy both heightened quality of life and equality of residents.

Getting rid of our private automobile-dominated transportation system should be a priority for all those who believe in social equality and saving our environment.

The earthquake made Mathias homeless when it crushed his apartment and killed his cousin and younger brother. He and his wife first stayed in a park next to St. Anne’s Catholic Church. Then the family moved to what they thought was a safer place, Sylvio Cator stadium. They put up a tent on the lawn inside the stadium and stayed there for several months. The authorities then moved them just outside of the stadium so the soccer team could practice. They lived in a tent outside the stadium with 514 other families for over a year until they were ordered to leave in July 2011. Each family was told they had to leave and were given 10,000 Goudes (about $250 in US dollars) to assist in their relocation. Where did the 514 families go? No one knows for sure. About 150 families stayed together and live under tarps beside Mathias. Some used the money to build new tarp shelters elsewhere and some used it for food. The rest? No one knows. No one is keeping track.

When I asked what Mathias would like to say to the human rights community, he said:

The life of the people living in the tents is not a human life. Our human rights are not respected. No institutions are taking care of us, we are the forgotten. We want people to remember us and help us to have the human life we should have. It’s not our choice to live this way. The situation of life bring us here. We hope to have a normal life. But the hope is very far from us.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported August 19, 2011 that there are about 594,800 people living in about 1000 displacement camps in Haiti. Most want to leave but have nowhere to go. Nearly 8000 people have been evicted in the last three months. Their report concludes by saying “With nearly 600,000 internally displaced persons still in camps, the scale of Haiti’s homeless problem remains daunting.”

Complicating the problem is the increasing wave of forced evictions happening in Haiti. These are evictions without any legal process, often by police, frequently accompanied by violence.

Landowners use armed police and private security to carry out evictions and scare people away. They rarely go to court because they usually cannot prove they own the land. So they resort to brute force to overwhelm the families. Police and private security use guns, machetes, batons and bulldozers to push people out.

The administration of President Michel Martelly has apparently given a green light to widespread violent demolition of camps without any legal process. Though the administration announced plans to relocate families from six camps, nothing has happened.

The Haitian human rights law firm Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) reports that before June they were receiving several threats of forced evictions per month. Since June, the threats increased to several per week. Now they are receiving several reports of forced evictions every day.

Dozens of human rights activists called on the United Nations to condemn these illegal evictions and to make Haiti impose a moratorium on illegal evictions until there are realistic plans to house the families being uprooted.

These evictions are in defiance of a ruling by the Inter American Commission on Human Rights which issued precautionary measures asking Haiti to cease illegal evictions. On November 18, 2010, the IACHR expressed concern over forced evictions of the displaced and sexual violence against women and girls. Specifically, the IACHR wrote Haiti asking the government to “offer those who have been illegally expelled from the camps a transfer to places that have minimum health and security conditions, and then transfer them if they so agree; guarantee that internally displaced persons have access to effective recourse before a court and before other competent authorities; implement effective security measures to safeguard the physical integrity of the inhabitants of the camps, guaranteeing especially the protection of women and children; train the security forces in the rights of displaced persons, especially their right not to be forcibly expelled from the camps; and ensure that international cooperation agencies have access to the camps.”

Residents recently surveyed by BAI and the University of San Francisco said money given them upon eviction was insufficient to relocate or pay rent anywhere. Small grants worth about $250 are not enough to build even the most basic 12×10 shack with plywood walls, a corrugated metal roof and concrete floor – leaving many of those evicted without any shelter except to go put up a tarp in another displacement camp. No wonder that 35 percent of them reported being the victims of physical harm or threats of physical harm.

The following are recent examples of illegal forced evictions, all have occurred since Martelly became President.

On May 27, 2011, at 6am, Haitian National Police wielding machetes and knives stormed a camp in the Delmas 3 neighborhood destroying about 200 makeshift tents, and forcing people to flee, according to Jacqueline Charles of the Miami Herald. There was no court order of eviction.

In early June, Haitian National Police showed up and began destroying tarps and tents of hundreds of families camped at the intersection of Delmas and Airport Roads. The police fired shots and swung batons as people protested in front of their camp. This was done without legal authority.

Later in June, at another camp in Delmas 3, truckloads of agents armed with machetes descended on another camp and dismantled it. After the tents were destroyed a bulldozer showed up and leveled what was left. This too was without any legal process.

In a midnight raid on July 3, 2011, police and private security forces completely destroyed tents of about 30 families in Camp Eric Jean-Baptiste in the Port au Prince suburb of Carrefour.

On July 18, 2011, Haitian National Police entered the displacement camp in the parking lot of Sylvio Cator sports stadium and destroyed the tents and belongings of 514 families. There was no lawful process. People were given about $250 to pay for new shelters. Many told human rights monitors that they did not want the money, they wanted to stay but accepted the money as they had no other options. These illegal evictions were condemned by the UN Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights.

On July 27, 2011, members of the Haitian National Police arrested, assaulted and ransacked tents of internally displaced people protesting against the illegal eviction of dozens of families at Camp Django. Camp residents were given about $125 for their destroyed shelters.

So, what should be happening?

The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, co-chaired by former US President Bill Clinton, just pledged $78 million to fund a housing plan for 16 districts in Haiti. But, as Haiti Grassroots Watch reports, even if all the planned repairs and construction of 68,025 units takes place, that is only 22 percent of what is needed since there are over 300,000 families and 600,000 people living in camps.

It is time for the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, the UN, The US and the international community to stand up for the human rights of the hundreds of thousands of people like Mathias. Housing is a human right. Using force to evict homeless survivors of Haiti’s earthquake from one spot to make them homeless in another place is illegal, senseless and violent. Mathias and his family deserve much more.

• Vladimir Laguerre helped with this article.

Prosperity, however, is not synonymous with wealth or income. Greater prosperity is not the same as economic growth or rise in income. “To prosper” (from Latin word prosperus) means “to flourish”, “to enjoy vigorous and healthy growth”. Prosperity means to flourish physically, psychologically, socially and spiritually. It does not mean to succeed in material terms or to be successful financially. Although wealth is an element in prosperity, material wealth does not necessarily indicate a happy and fulfilled life, and emotional and spiritual wellbeing. Most of the time the expensive material things we surround ourselves with convey a void in life and a craving for acceptance, recognition and identity − the basic human needs. One may have all the money, yet live with the nagging feeling of emptiness, restlessness and even boredom. A void that can not be filled with wealth and material things.

But in the present day highly unequal societies the importance of income and wealth in prosperity or wellbeing is played out through relative effects. Income disparities indicate status differences. So what matters is having more income and wealth than those around us. At times it gives power and authority. Income and wealth also give access to “status goods” that is very important in establishing one’s social standing. Because in unequal societies status competition is intense and we are sensitive to how we are perceived or judged by others. Robert Frank’s books Luxury Fever or Falling Behind show how consumption is about status competition. People spend thousands of rupees on accessories such as handbags and sunglasses with the right labels to make statements about themselves. It is not that they want to spend so much of money on mere “things.” Money is spent on the value attached to some of the consumer goods in society. Because we experience ourselves through each other’s eyes. That is the reason for right labels, designer clothes, latest model cars and branded accessories. Consumer goods are not mere stuff, but “language” in social relationships. Through things we convey with one another our identity, social status, social affiliation and feelings – through giving and receiving gifts − for one another. Consumer goods play a role in our lives that goes way beyond their material functionality. That is why they continue to captivate us even beyond the point of usefulness.

Consumerism is powerful. We continue to invent or reinvent our social identity and status through accumulation of latest “status goods” that have arrived in market. Novelty carries with it important information about status. Companies continue to stuff market with new “status goods” and promote them by hiring popular brand ambassadors to entice consumers to emulate these popular figures in order to reposition themselves on the social ladder. Thus, there is a direct correlation between restless desire for new consumer goods and their continual production by corporate companies. The relentless pursuit for novelty creates anxiety, which in turn affects physical, psychological and spiritual wellbeing.

Consumerism interferes with the workings of society by replacing the normal common sense desire for an adequate supply of life’s necessities, community life, a stable family and healthy relationships with an artificial ongoing and insatiable quest for things and the money to buy them, with little regard for the true utility of what is bought. An intended consequence of this, promoted by those who profit from consumerism, is to accelerate the discarding of the old, either because of lack of durability or a change in fashion. This makes people to work for long hours to have more income to place themselves in a conspicuous position in the social hierarchy through acquiring latest consumer appliances, accessories and fashions. This is a vicious cycle. People have less time because they work more. They work more because they want more to maintain a higher standard of living. That means, as a society we are choosing MONEY over TIME. It creates anxiety and stress, and undermines physical and mental health and family relationships. Spending time with spouse and children, and having rest and relaxation become secondary to the chasing of mirage called social status and identity in a consumer society. The moment we think we have got it, entrepreneur invents new consumer goods and with that the social identity and status will change. We will never arrive there in our life time, because it is a MIRAGE.

The wisdom of the old says, “I made great works; I built houses, and planted vineyards for myself; I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees. I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees. I bought male and female slaves, and had slaves who were born in my house; I also had great possessions of herds and flocks, more than any who had been before me in Jerusalem. I also gathered for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and of provinces; I got singers, both men and women, and delights of the flesh, and many concubines. So I became great…” (Ecclesiastes 2.4-9). He asks, “What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun?” and declares that it is like “a chasing after the wind” (Ecclesiastes 1.2; 2.11).

Consumerism numbs us and we live in delusion that it gives “fruits of life” − fruits that satisfy basic human needs and sustain human life. When common sense prevails we will realize what all important things we have lost in life like the joy of spending time with spouse, children and friends, and physical and mental health in rest and relaxation.

Surely material goods are essential to meet our basic needs: food, clothing and shelter. In order to buy food, clothing, housing and other basic needs money is required. However, once a person’s basic needs are met, money takes on a different meaning. Money brings happiness only insofar as it lifts people out of poverty. Once that level is crossed, the link between material wealth and wellbeing and happiness is very thin. Psychological studies show that more income and more consumer goods do not lead to lasting gains in our sense of wellbeing or satisfaction in our life. Psychologist Tim Kasser highlights what he calls the high price of materialism. According to him, materialistic values such as popularity, image and financial success are psychologically opposed to intrinsic values like – self-acceptance, affiliation and a sense of belonging to a community. He further says that people with higher intrinsic values are happier than those with materialistic values.

Take, for example, the people of the Scandinavian countries: Sweden and Denmark. The people of these countries have consistently been found to be among the happiest in the world. According to the same studies the people of Costa Rica are happier that the Scandinavians, although the per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of Costa Rica is only one-fourth that of Sweden and Denmark.

Similarly, Guatemalans are happier than those of the United States, despite its low income level than that of the latter. So there is hardly any correlation between levels of wealth and levels of happiness and wellbeing, once poverty level is crossed. Economic growth and higher incomes in the US are supposed to deliver prosperity − that, at least, is the conventional wisdom. But the ground reality does not support the conventional view. In the US, the economic super power, the rates of depression, obesity, heart attacks, divorces, and suicides have skyrocketed. Antidepressants are now the most commonly prescribed drugs. The nation consumes two-thirds of the global market for drugs prescribed to combat chronic sadness and hopelessness. One study found that today the average American child experiences higher levels of anxiety than did the average child under psychiatric care in the 1950s.

After analyzing more than 150 studies on wealth and happiness, Diener and Martin Seligman, two of the world’s top experts on the science of happiness, wrote: 
”Although economic output has risen steeply over the past decades, there has been no rise in life satisfaction… and there has been a substantial increase in depression and distrust.”
Inequality affects our ability to trust and our sense that we are part of a community. Thus, it affects social relations, and promotes individualism and self-centeredness. People become insensitive to the needs of others. “Inequality takes the form of dominance hierarchies, based on power and coercion and privileged access to resources…That’s why power, status and wealth all go together at the top and why powerlessness, hunger and poverty go together at the bottom.”

In egalitarian societies, where there is a strong community life, there is more trust, caring, sharing and people give higher priority to common good. They experience greater joy and satisfaction when they share and work together for common good. In such societies there is less importance to social status, and so less positional competition. That means, less importance for “status goods”. This reduces anxiety, and enhances the quality of life. This is what prosperity means. Tim Jackson, Economics Commissioner, Sustainable Development Commission, says, “Prosperity goes beyond material pleasures. It transcends material concerns. It resides in the quality of our lives and in the health and happiness of our families. It is present in the strength of our relationships and our trust in the community. It is evidenced by our satisfaction at work and our sense of shared meaning and purpose. It hangs on our potential to participate fully in the life of society. Prosperity consists in our ability to flourish as human beings – within the ecological limits of a finite planet.”¹

1. Tim Jackson, Prosperity without Growth: The Transition to a Sustainable Economy. The Sustainable Development Commission, March 2009.

That is the context in which these riots need to be seen. Our mode of living in the West is predicated on violence and looting. For those who do not understand this, you need to look into how Western military forces have turned Afghanistan into a giant heroin poppy plantation with one of the lowest life expectancies on the planet, how they have turned Iraq into a living hell to steal its oil, how they are setting up Syria for an invasion as a prelude to the ‘final solution’ of the Palestinian ‘problem’ and how they are already stealing Libyan oil wealth which Gaddafi had ploughed into African development but will now go straight into the coffers of Western arms companies. This is before we even mention the debt-extortion under which third world countries pay 13 times as much in loan interest to the West (on loans they have already paid back many times over) as they receive in aid.

Our young people have grown up witnessing all of this. They are well aware that the West enriches itself by violent plunder. They are also aware that more than half of their so-called ‘representatives’ in parliament have been systematically stealing TVs, electronic goods, clothes and anything else they think they can get away with, by means of large-scale fraud. They know that the police murder people with impunity, and their communities are subject to harassment and humiliation by police on a mass scale. They know that the bankers who have destroyed the livelihoods of millions, are still paying themselves bonuses extorted from the public purse.

They also know that none of these people are ever likely to be bought to justice through legal mechanisms. Most of the MPs guilty of fraud either still have their jobs, or have moved on to lucrative directorships with the companies for whom they did favours whilst in office. The police investigate themselves and find themselves not guilty. The army investigate themselves and find themselves not guilty. Tony Blair investigates himself and finds himself not guilty. The rich and powerful are demonstrating to our young people daily that the way to succeed is through robbery, theft and violence. This is the world into which they were born. This is the morality which surrounds them. This is the air they breathe.

Compared to their role models, the vast majority of the rioters have behaved impeccably. Attacks on small businesses, houses and civilians have been the exception, not the rule; the main activity has been the looting of big chain stores and the besieging of police stations. In so doing, the youth have succeeded in achieving what everyone else has failed to achieve – holding the police and corporations to account. The message to the police has been clear – you cannot murder, beat and humiliate us with impunity. Several police stations have been burned to the ground and all London police have had their summer leave cancelled. When incidents like Mark Duggan’s murder arise, it is never a case of one ‘bad apple’; the process of cover-up is a systematic one which requires large-scale collusion. Some officers may now think twice before getting entangled in such matters in the future.

As for the big corporations, the efficiency of their exploitation and enslavement of third world people has created such poverty across the globe that people are increasingly unable to afford to buy what they produce. This is the major systemic cause of the economic crisis. They may not know it, but the corporations our children are attacking are indeed the primary cause of their own poverty. More than this, these companies employ advertising techniques that ruthlessly target our children with a cruel message that their social status depends on the acquisition of their goods; they should not then feign surprise when poor children also try to acquire them.

With their “mindless looting,” the dispossessed youth are, in fact, carrying out a primitive form of wealth redistribution. What they are doing in a disorganised and spontaneous way is precisely what we should be doing in a systematic and disciplined way. We need to build organisations that are serious about creating ‘socialism from below’ – taking control of the factories, chain stores and land, and using them in a way that provides for the massive social needs for which capitalism is completely unable to provide. This is the real Big Society – the one Cameron and his ilk are utterly scared of.

I am not blaming Cameron, or the politicians, or the media. These are our enemies. They are being true to their class. They are exploiting us and lying to us efficiently and effectively. They are doing their jobs perfectly. I am blaming those of us who do care, who do want equality and an end to classism, racism and imperialism. We need to step up and provide leadership and organisation, and until we do that our criticisms of the youth are hollow and deceitful. If we leave it to children to bring accountability to policing and to redistribute wealth, without any leadership or guidance, we shouldn’t be surprised if they do a messy job.

As the date approaches I can’t help but contemplate what all of this should mean to the original people of Louisiana and to my tribe, the Houma, specifically. What should our view be of American statehood? What can we learn from the history behind this event and how is that history relevant to us today?

Trade, Commerce, and Profit

At the end of the eighteenth century the enfant American empire set itself on a path that would come to be articulated as Manifest Destiny. As it sought to expand its economic base and political influence the newly United States quickly set their sights on the economic jewel of the continent, New Orleans.

The geographical location of the “Isle of Orleans” gave New Orleans control of the commerce of the lower Mississippi River and access to the vast markets of the Caribbean.

In 1795 the United States and Spain (who had controlled Louisiana since 1763) signed the Pinckney Treaty that gave the American merchants the “right of deposit” in the city, allowing them to store their goods for export. The treaty also gave them the right to navigate the Mississippi. With these rights in place the fledgling American economy expanded and the wealthy business class began to consolidate its base.

For almost three years the merchant class saw their fortunes rise to new heights till 1798 when new Spanish officials suddenly slammed the door by revoking the Pinckney Treaty. Though Spain would restore the treaty in 1801 the U.S. would not soon forget the economic price paid for its inability to control New Orleans and the trade that flowed through its port.

Thomas Jefferson would see an opportunity when he learned that Spain had transferred Louisiana back to France with the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1801. He quickly sent a representative to Paris to begin negotiations with Napoleon’s government for the purchase of New Orleans. To the surprise of many, after months of talks, Napoleon offered to sell not just New Orleans but rather the entire Louisiana Territory.

The process would come to a close on April 30th, 1803 when the Louisiana Purchase Agreement was signed in Paris. For fifteen million dollars the United States acquired over eight hundred thousand square miles, effectively doubling the physical size of the American empire.

For the population of Louisiana the visible reality came in December when the French tri-color was lowered for the last time in the Place de Arms and in its place was raised the stars and stripes.

American Indians?

The original colonial claim on Louisiana was made by France in 1682 when Rene-Robert Cavalier Sieur de La Salle, standing on the banks of the Mississippi near its mouth, expressed ownership in the name of his king. When the United States wrote a fifteen million dollar check for the same piece of real estate one hundred and twenty-one years later there would be one common denominator between the two events; nowhere in the process were the people of the land, the indigenous people of Louisiana consulted or their opinions or concerns considered.

For the Houma the early territorial, period brought a new colonial reality and new challenges. In 1806 and 1811 Houma chiefs met with W.C.C. Claiborne, the U.S. Territorial governor. Gifts and pleasantries were exchanged but the Americans would make no guaranties of Houma sovereignty or land rights.

Attempting to navigate the new colonial system the Houma sought to secure their survival through a variety of efforts. While Houma warriors were fighting with the privateer Jean Lafitte to defend New Orleans against a British invasion force in 1815 the tribe was also fighting its way through the American territorial bureaucracy.

Houma leaders understood that the Louisiana Purchase Agreement obligated the United States to respect the relationship between the tribe and the colonial governments that preceded the Americans. So in hopes of securing the land base that had been respected by both the French and Spanish the Houma filed a claim for twelve sections of land adjacent to the village at Pointe Ouiski (located near the modern city of Houma, Louisiana). The response of the federal land office was a refusal to recognize the tribe’s rights to the land. There would be no federal protection of those rights, a status of non-recognition that continues to the present day.

Louisiana statehood did little or nothing to secure the rights of the Indigenous Peoples of Louisiana; for the Houma those ghost of colonialism would to haunt the present and the future.

The Cost of Colonialism

In 2005 the Houma community was impacted by two major hurricanes, Katrina and Rita. Over half of the tribes 17000 citizens were affected by one or both of the storms. As the tribal government struggled, without direct federal assistance, to aide their people in recovery one question was asked of us over and over again by people unfamiliar with the tribe and its history.

“Why do your people live in communities so at risk from the forces of nature?”

The answer is both simple and complex; the simple answer is that the effects of coastal erosion have left the Houma communities along the south Louisiana coast at risk from any storm that enters the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana, as a whole, has lost nearly 2000 square miles of coast since 1930 and a large part of that has come from the lands of the Houma.

The complex answer goes to the root causes of this dilemma and examines the motivating forces that continue to perpetuate the problem. Much of this has been debated for years and the blame has been categorized and fractionalized but for the Houma the answer is quite clear. Our homeland has been subjected to a century of unchecked economic development. The pursuit of profit that motivated the American traders at the end of the eighteenth century energized itself with twentieth century technology and began to devour the resources of the land.

Neo-colonialism is a twentieth century term used to describe the relationship of former colonial powers to their former colonies. The term examines how resource colonies continue to be subjected to imperial aggression and control even after their declared independence. The term has great resonance here in the fast disappearing marshlands of coastal Louisiana.

The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world.

– Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism, 1965

The early years of statehood saw the Houma forced out of their village at Pointe Ouiski by the expanding settlement that would become the town of Houma in 1834. Ironically the settlers would name the town after the band of Indians living at Pointe Ouiski while they were in the process of forcing them to surrender their land.

The Houma moved south to their seasonal villages in the lower bayous and found a degree of security in the swamps and marshlands along the coast. In relative isolation the tribal population rebounded and they grew strong as hunters, trappers and fishermen. The twentieth century would dawn on a Houma tribe occupying settlements from Mauvais Bois in the west to lower Bayou Lafourche in the east, all with a twenty-five mile radius of the central settlement at Point Barre.

With the twentieth century came first the academics (ethnologist, anthropologist, etc.), then Protestant missionaries, followed by land speculators, and finally the oil companies. The economic exploitation that would come to be defined as neo-colonialism was as much at home in south Louisiana as it was in post-colonial Africa and the Middle East. The second century of statehood would continue to see coastal Louisiana more closely resemble the neo-colonial resource colony rather than an equal member of the United States.

This exploitation would quickly establish the earliest causes of coastal erosion. Seeking to enhance commerce and protect rich plantation lands along the lower reaches of Bayou Lafourche it was dammed at its source in 1904. This effectively shut off the natural land-building flow of sediment laden fresh water that had replenished the swamps and marshlands for centuries.

By the 1930s the exploration of oil had begun and the industry began to dig a massive network of canals into the south Louisiana coast to facilitate access for their drilling equipment.

The effect was predictable; the loss of fresh water and sediment along with the introduction of marsh-killing salt water which poured in from the Gulf through the access canals began to eat away at the fragile estuaries. Added to this toxic combination was the industry pulling billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of gas from beneath those same estuaries. This caused a level of subsidence that scientist have only recently began to acknowledge. For the Houma the result is the land beneath our feet is literally washing away as the days go by.

We’ve lived in our coastal settlements for generations; most of our people still make their living as commercial fishermen. When the land speculators and oil drillers came to our lands they found an indigenous population that was illiterate in English and uneducated in the ways of American society. Indeed local governments had made a concerted effort to maintain that imbalance by refusing to allow Indian children to attend public school in the parishes of LaFourche and Terrebonne (home to the majority of the Houma people). A lawsuit and the Civil Rights movement finally opened the door to public education for the tribe but it was not until 1964 that the first Houma student breached those barriers.

College educated leaders were generations away; with few rights and little resources the effects of oil fueled neo-colonialism were beyond the ability of the tribe to stop. It continues into the present and is easily seen if anyone cares to look.

Coastal Louisiana provides nearly thirty percent of U.S. energy production and transports nearly forty percent with its network of pipelines, transfer stations and refineries. A large portion of this infrastructure sits atop the Barataria-Terrebonne estuary, the estuarine system between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya River basins that has been the homeland of the Houma for centuries.

The price paid for this resource extraction can be easily calculated with the nearly 500 square miles of land lost in this estuary alone in the last eighty years, an area of land comparable to the size of New York City.

With the loss of land comes increased vulnerability to the effects of tropical storms and hurricanes. Healthy marshlands that had once protected Houma settlements from storm surges are now gone and the people now exist on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. Storm centers that pass a hundred miles away can still bring catastrophic flooding. Since 2005 the Houma have been impacted by four major storms.

This situation also leaves portions of the oil industry exposed as well. In 2005 hurricanes Katrina and Rita damaged pipelines and platforms and caused numerous spills totaling millions of gallons of oil. The industry claims the loss, collects their profits and rarely pays any compensation to the people of the land.

This would be amply illustrated on April 20th, 2010 when the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig would explode off the Louisiana coast initiating the largest oil spill in U.S. history.

BPs World

For those who take the time to look and examine carefully the words and actions of the U.S. Government and the oil industry during the heated days of the summer of 2010 the reality of “colonial Louisiana” in the 21st century is easily seen and understood.

Louisiana politicians were in quite a dilemma in those days. With the effects of the BP spill multiplying by the minute and the population of Gulf Coast becoming more desperate, state and local leaders were caught in between opposing camps. They had to face up to the real needs of their constituency without alienating the largest source of campaign funding available to them.

If you lived outside of the region you may have had some difficulty understanding the scope of their problem. Most people in this country have a basic understanding of an elected official’s responsibility to those whom they are tasked with representing. What is hidden from sight is the other side of the equation, the level of influence and control that big oil exerts on the Louisiana political structure. If we lived in an open and honest society then Louisiana politicians would be forced to decorate their clothing to the level of their corporate sponsorship, with some of them looking a lot like NASCAR drivers.

In the real world they go out of the way to disguise their financial motivators which, in turn, give us some interesting mental exercises and verbal acrobatics. Watching politicians who both opposed and defended big oil simultaneously was quite a show.

Consider the rhetoric of Michel Claudet, President of Terrebonne Parish. As the tentacles of oil slowly crept into the bayous below Houma threatening the fishing grounds and settlements of the Houma People his major focus seemed to be on the economic impact of the drilling ban proposed by the Obama administration. According to Claudet commercial fishing accounted for only 20 % of the parish economy while oil and gas brought in 60%. In the press he was adamant about the economic benefits brought to the parish by big oil.

This of course was an interesting point of view expressed by an administration that filed suit against 29 oil companies in August of 2009. The suit alleged that the companies failed to report the ownership of tens of millions of dollars of property resulting in a loss of tax revenue to the parish. The parish is seeking the payment of delinquent taxes as well as penalties and interest accrued.

The parish had also filed suit against BP for projected damages from the Deepwater Horizon spill. Any awards from the suit were slated to be split between the State Conservation Fund and the Terrebonne District Attorney’s Office.

Despite the expressed appreciation of the oil economy there seemed to exist a great degree of mistrust and animosity between the industry and local government.

On the state level we were subjected to an unending string of photo ops and press conferences by Governor Bobby Jindal. He had been from Venice to Grand Isle and back extolling his own ability to understand the severity of the problem and the Obama administrations ineptitude. From helping to deploy oil boom to operating an oil suction truck he endeavored to prove he was a “hands-on” guy. Walking that same political tight rope his sound bites were full of condemnation for democratic opponents and light on real criticisms of big oil. Indeed most of his venom was reserved for the proposed ban on offshore drilling.

On the federal level we witnessed an American administration providing an amazing amount of cover to a “foreign” company. To the extent that Homeland security personnel were physically restricting press access to contaminated area not in the interest of U.S. security but because BP wanted to protect its public relations front.

As to the drilling moratorium, the truth of the matter was there was some substance to all of their economic arguments concerning the ban. It had a detrimental effect on employment in the local oil industry but the story is not as simple as it was portrayed.

The American Petroleum Institute (API) estimates that nearly 50,000 people are directly or indirectly employed by the offshore drilling industry on the Gulf Coast. U.S. Government figures were estimating that as many as 150,000 people nation-wide could be effected in some form by the proposed moratorium on offshore drilling.

The other side of the argument was that the federal government wanted a six month moratorium to determine if the industry was in compliance with current safety regulations in hopes of preventing another Deepwater Horizon-type accident.

Beneath the surface of this supposed conflict between government and industry lies the reality of neo-colonialism in the heart of Houma Indian territory for almost a century.

Like all poor and indigenous communities dealing with economic exploitation the magic cure for everything is money and jobs. Living amidst a depleted ecosystem we are cautioned to value the employment the oil industry brings. Politicians like Claudet, Jindal and others, both Democrat and Republican extol the economic benefits the state enjoys from big oil.

We must understand that to the neo-colonial politics of big oil we are pawns, a tool in their efforts to control government influence of corporate finance. Every attempt made by government to control the industry is met by the same response; it will cost jobs and raise fuel cost. The moratorium was a perfect example of this principle; though it affected only a fraction of the activity in the Gulf there was disproportionate layoff of personnel and heighten gas prices. This, of course, was not people employed directly by Exxon, BP, Shell, etc. but rather it was primarily support industries and lower paying jobs for the most part. This is not to say that there was no real economic downside to the moratorium but rather that the industry did its best to magnify the affect for political gain and cover its real neo-colonial relationship to coastal Louisiana. So for the families dependent on a job at the fuel dock or in a fabrication yard their financial stability could fail because of an ongoing power struggle between Washington, Wall Street and the Energy Corporation boardrooms.

A year after the spill corporate profits were in the stratosphere and the propaganda machine was telling the world that the oil is gone, a neo-colonial economic happy ending. For the Gulf Coast and the Houma communities the reality is, of course, not so neat and tidy.

The Endgame

For the Houma People this is more than just an academic exercise or a political critique, this is a sober assessment on where we are as a people and what does this century have in store for us.

We have survived three centuries of colonization and we still exist as an indigenous community despite all that we have endured. I have the greatest confidence in the strength and tenacity of Houma People which fuels my hope for the future. But to face that future we have to acknowledge the harsh realities of the present so that we may clearly see the path ahead. We must face the consequences of neo-colonialism and understand what it has done to our homes, our families, our communities, our homeland, our tribe.

After decades of oil exploration and production the 3rd Congressional District (in which all of the major Houma settlement reside in2010) ranked 403rd out of 436 U.S. Congressional districts according to the Human Development Index. The American dream or the colonial reality? It would seem that for all of the billions of dollars extracted from the land there is not much trickling back down to the people of the land.

And as the resources continue to be consumed the land is leaving with them, washing away at an ever increasing rate. A couple of years ago coastal scientist drew a horizontal red line across south Louisiana and proclaimed that everything south of that line was endanger of disappearing in the coming decade if the economic and political will could not be produced to tackle the problem of coastal erosion in the next ten years. This statement drove deep into the heart of the Houma People, every major Houma community is below that red line.

What about the industry at the center of the coastal erosion controversy, has the BP spill and the drilling moratorium it inspired shown a more critical light and highlighted its responsibility to the land and people? If we are to look to the recent past there is little to inspire hope. Less than four percent of the oil and gas permits issued require the companies to perform any mitigation to offset the damages caused by their activities. Between 2005 and 2009 some 4500 permits were applied for and not a single one was declined, indeed over one hundred were issued after the fact. Neo-colonial resource extraction continues unabated.

For the Houma who continue to live in the traditional communities existence becomes more difficult as time goes on. The penalties for coastal erosion are not allocated to the industries that bare most of the responsibilities but rather to the people of the coast who can little afford to pay them.

They come in the form of ever increasing insurance rates, the inability to get financing for a new home or the cost of elevating an existing home all of which continue to rise above the means of a Houma fishing family. Though the Houma have done nothing to cause the ecological devastation that surrounds them and have not profited from it they must continually absorb the cost.

Houma communities are edging towards extinction as businesses leave and local governments transfer resources north, effectively abandoning the Houma families. Between 2000 and 2010 the town of Dulac, which has the largest concentration of Houma people, has lost 40% of its population.

Houma fishermen contend with ever decreasing prices for their catch and ever increasing cost for fuel and supplies. Added to this is the lingering effects of the BP spill and the unknown long term damage the five million barrels of oil released into the Gulf has had and will have on the already fragile coastal estuaries that are the foundation of the Houma life ways.

The parameters of the Houma situation has a closer resemblance to the predicaments faced by the Indigenous Peoples of the Nigerian delta or the Ecuadorean Amazon than to those on the list of tribes seeking federal recognition from the U.S. Government.

The answers for the Houma will be found when they begin to acknowledge this common ground with international indigenous struggles and stop looking for salvation from the potential largess of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

After two centuries of living within the borders of the American state of Louisiana they are still on the outside looking in. The Houma exist today in the same state of federal non-recognition that they were assigned to in the early years of the nineteenth century. They would do well to heed the admonition of the great anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon.

“He who is reluctant to recognize me is against me.”

Around 10.7 million people already need urgent humanitarian assistance, while many thousands are fleeing a devastated Somalia each day to take refuge in makeshift camps across Ethiopia and Kenya. The United Nations has now officially declared two regions of southern Somalia to be in famine – a situation in which at least 20 percent of households face a complete lack of food and other basic necessities, and starvation, death and destitution are evident. As the Famine Early Warning Systems Network makes clear, the currently inadequate levels of humanitarian response are likely to see famine spread across all eight regions of southern Somalia within two months and could lead to “total livelihood/social collapse”.

With food insecurity in the East African region remaining an ongoing concern for decades, many humanitarian agencies have been trying to draw attention to a potential famine in these countries for some time. The UN made an appeal for $500m in 2010 to assist with food security, but managed to secure only half from donors. Consequently, hunger levels have rocketed over recent months, and in some areas the number of young children suffering malnutrition is now three times the normal emergency level. At least half a million children risk death if immediate help does not reach them, according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The humanitarian coordinator for Somalia has also described the lack of resources as alarming, with insufficient donations of food, clean water, shelter and health services to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Somalis in desperate need. The underlying problem is repeated by various aid organisations: that the international response is not commensurate with the urgent requirements of those affected by the humanitarian catastrophe, and there is a lack of international support to address the deep-seated causes of the crisis or to mitigate future crises.

Yet the extreme deprivation being widely reported across East African is just the tip of the iceberg. Needless impoverishment and death is an ongoing catastrophe that unfolds daily, largely without any attention from the world’s media or the public. At least 41,000 people in the developing world continue to die each day from easily preventable diseases that barely occur in high-income countries, such as diarrhoea, malaria or nutritional deficiencies. Despite the scale of these preventable deaths – amounting to 15 million lives lost each year, half of which affect young children before their fifth birthday – there is no official recognition that such extreme deprivation should also be considered a humanitarian catastrophe and treated accordingly.

These shameful mortality rates occur as a result of the ongoing silent disaster of world poverty, which receives a similarly inadequate international response to the periodic famines or food crises in countries like Somalia. For over a decade, international efforts to reduce poverty have centred around the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of globally agreed targets that are set to expire in 2015. Although the MDGs have done much to focus attention on global poverty, they are widely considered an insufficient and superficial approach to economic development and saving lives.

A Deadly Lack of Ambition

The politically sensitive principles of equity and distributive justice that featured in the original Millennium Declaration have gradually faded from the official development discourse, accompanied by a deadly lack of ambition. Even if the MDG goal on halving rates of poverty is met, a staggering 882 million people will still be living in absolute poverty in 2015. In effect, the MDG’s focus on merely reducing over time the number of people living below the threshold of human survival tacitly accepts the continuance of poverty-related deaths each day. Similarly, goals four and five commit to reduce maternal mortality by only three quarters by 2015, and under-five child mortality by two-thirds, which accepts not only a high number of preventable maternal and child deaths remaining at the end of the MDG period, but also many millions of such needless deaths in the interim.

In an interdependent and globalised world, there can be no meaningful process of development whilst so many people living in poverty die prematurely and unnecessarily. The impact on families, communities and economies are devastating, and preventing these deaths is an urgent moral necessity. Even in the crudest economic calculations, putting an end to avoidable deaths would amount to a significant investment in human capital, as healthy individuals whose basic needs are secured are far more likely to contribute to the growth of communities and nations. It is objectionable from any social, moral or economic viewpoint that sufficient resources are not immediately made available to address the crises of extreme deprivation, especially in its most acute manifestation well before the situation degenerates into a full-blown famine.

International efforts to address the life-threatening poverty of millions of people in the poorest countries must aim far higher and provide much more than the current insufficient, voluntary and often conditional donations of overseas aid and disaster assistance. A massively upscaled redistribution of resources from North to South is essential to avert humanitarian disasters and prevent extreme deprivation and poverty-related deaths. Given the scale of these related crises, an international program of emergency relief must become the highest priority of world governments, followed by assistance for developing countries to secure ongoing state-provided welfare and essential services for all their citizens. Efforts to improve the redistribution of wealth nationally through the development of local industries, better taxation and the provision of comprehensive social protection for all people should become the new focus of international development policy.

Central to this transformation of development is the principle of sharing, which embodies universally accepted ethical values that reflect our common humanity. Aligning the international policy discourse more closely to our shared moral obligations can help redeem decades of unjust economic and social policy, prevent future famines and help manifest an inclusive vision of progress and development. In the simplest economic terms, sharing points to the need for a redistribution of wealth from rich to poor, and a shift in power relations from financial and commercial interests to the world’s majority population. The East African crisis presents another opportunity for civil society to demand that wealth and resources are shared more equitably across the world, and that policy-makers prioritise the complete eradication of poverty above all other concerns.

Moalim, quoted by the British Telegraph, was not posing as spokesperson to the estimated 11 million people (per United Nations figures) who are currently in dire need of food. About 440,000 of those affected by the world’s “worst humanitarian disaster” dwell in a state of complete despair in Dadaab, a complex of three camps in Kenya. Imagine the fate of those not lucky enough to reach these camps, people who remain chronically lacking in resources, and, in the case of Somalia, trapped in a civil war.

All that Batula Moalim was pleading for was “plastic sheeting for shelter, as well as for food and medicine.”

It is disheartening, to say the least, when such disasters don’t represent an opportunity for political, military or other strategic gains, subsequently, enthusiasm to ‘intervene’ peters out so quickly.

UN officials from the World Food Programme (WFP) are not asking for much: $500 million to stave off the effects of what is believed to be the worst drought to hit the Horn of Africa in 60 years. This is not an impossible feat, especially when one considers the geographic extent of the drought and creeping famine. Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti, Kenya are all affected, and terribly so. Sudan and Eretria are also not far from the center of this encroaching disaster.

60 percent of the amount requested by WFP has already been raised. More is needed, however, especially as the reverberation of the drought is already surpassing the immediate need for food and shelter. Five million are already at risk of cholera in Ethiopia alone, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Hundreds have reportedly died, and many more are likely to follow.

Cholera requires an immediate remedy as the intestinal infection leads to sever diarrhea, dehydration and death. Other figures are equally grim. 8.8 million people, also in Ethiopia, are at risk of contracting malaria, according to Tarik Jasarevic, WHO spokesman.  Jasarevic has also told journalists that these ailments have already been reported in Somalia, and other Ethiopian regions. This means the disaster is not confined to refugee camps and is thus much harder to control.

For refugees, there is nothing worse than having no safe haven in sight. Still, they must escape when death becomes the only alternative to aimless journeys. While hundreds of thousands are gathering in Kenya’s camps, an average of 1,700 Somali refugees venture to Ethiopia each day. The latter, a country with a population of about 85 million, is fully embroiled in the crisis. 4.5 million Ethiopians need assistance, a rise of over 50 percent in less than three months, according to WHO. One can only try to envisage the speed at which this disaster is unraveling.

International organizations, including WFP, WHO and UNICEF have made numerous appeals. Some major media outlets responded by giving the humanitarian crisis a degree of coverage. While donations have bashfully trickled in, the goals are yet to be reached. According to a report by the Telegraph, “no African country has offered a donation to help drought victims in the Horn of Africa outside of those affected.”

The report, published July 15, quoted Michael O’Brien-Onyeka, Oxfam’s Regional Campaigns Policy Manager for East and Central Africa, who said it was “disappointing” that “African states insist on ‘African solutions for African problems’ with regard to Libya but fail to respond to droughts and famines.”

On the subject of Libya, it may be helpful to consider some financial figures.

“The British Government has pledged £38 million in food aid to Ethiopia,” reported the Telegraph. The following day, British Daily Mirror reported on the seemingly different subject of Libya. Four more British jets were recently deployed to the war zone near Libya, raising the total to 22 RAF jets, according to James Lyons in the Mirror (July 16). The cost thus far is £260 million, only £40 million short of the total amount needed by the WFP to feed 11 million starving people.

Here is another example of the dubious nature of British involvement in the war on Libya (falsely slated as a war to prevent imminent massacres of civilians): “Tornado GR4s cost around £35,000 for every hour they are in the air and are having to fly long distances from their base in Gioia del Colle, southern Italy, to Libya,” according to the Mirror.

Major African countries and Britain are not the only parties involved in acts of duplicity. The US military adventurism in the Horn of African, especially Somalia, and its renewed use of costly unmanned drones can feed, cloth, shelter and treat countless refugees. More, Arab and Muslim countries tend to be the least responsive parties in such situations. While it is true that the chief of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu made several appeals for help, such singular calls generate feel-good moments but no major mobilization for action.

The disaster in the Horn of Africa is partly man-made. Countries with ‘failed states’ status (in other words, victims of outside interventions) cannot possibly fend off crises of this magnitude. For the last 20 years, Somalia has had no central government controlling the country’s territories. Outside intervention has made it impossible for any party to unite the disjointed country. What is a Somali refugee to do?

To help the millions disaffected by the multilayered disaster in the Horn of Africa, we need more than appeals for blankets and food stuff.  We also need a degree of human decency and common sense. We need to re-channel some of the funds wasted on disastrous wars into actually saving lives. If warning parties would ground their Tornado GR4s and other warplanes for a few days, the single action alone could save the entire region.

For now, though, let us all do what we can to help the Horn of Africa survive this terrible ordeal.

Yet, even back then there was a nagging question: America was great, powerful and good, how was it possible that we should have so much, both material and security, and others be so deprived? In my childish simplicity it seemed that my country could, if not fix the plight of others, then improve the conditions of their lives.

As a child I moved to the rural south. There I saw that migrant workers lived in tiny one-room shacks with no plumping, no glass or screens on the windows, often no real doors; I could see thin stacks of cardboard partly covered with dirty blankets on the floors. Blacks lived in isolated “towns” off the main roads, really medieval villages, out of sight, out of mind.

I began to marvel more specifically at my good luck to be born in America as a white child to parents with enough money to buy a little land, build a real house and have a working car. I visited a friend’s house, a small frame place with only exterior covering, the framing still exposed on the inside. In the bedroom, behind a blanket curtain, I saw my friend’s uncle, a skeleton in a bed, skull face with wet searching animal eyes; a man with some terrible degenerative disease. I added to my list of marvels that everyone in my family, including myself, was healthy.

The Korean War (police action) was thoroughly terrifying to my nearly 10-year-old person. I added to my list that my immediate surroundings were not being overrun by millions of bloodthirsty Chinese in very scary quilted fighting suits. At about this same time the sanctity and security of my white, middle class, American, healthy, not in a war-zone life began to be challenged by the Russian Communists, who could, and perhaps wanted to, deliver and drop atomic bombs on my grade school. I felt completely out-classed by atomic bombs; that famous aerial photo of Hiroshima, ‘after,’ would dance up in my mind and I would search it for something that looked like my schoolyard.

Yet, even with all these things going on, the paradoxes of my safety and ease of life compared to those skinny farmers in India, their stick children trying to hide behind their stick mother or the naked little children of a Central American jungle village… I tried and tried to understand how they felt, how they might think about their world, what it must be like to be them.

My life remained remarkably easy by comparison: school, work, relationships; maybe not so much relationships, I wasn’t very good with relationships, but I was bright and quite attractive – like a shiny object that you want to pick up and play with until it proves not so interesting after all – and so always had people around. The rest of the world, on the other hand, also continued on with its incomprehensible inequities: Vietnam, South Africa, Central and South America, the Congo and a hundred other places where human life was not recognized as such or of any particular value by the powers-that-be there.

And the point of this little reconnoiter through personal reflections? It seems the usefulness of the social and economic structures that protected me and many millions more like me are coming to an end. I have come to understand that never was the “normalcy” of my life experience normal; it was a hiatus from the normal lived out in the momentum of a previous time. The experience of South Korean villagers driven from their homes by war was normal. The aboriginal displaced from ancestral lands (pick your country) was normal. The little 400 square foot apartment with 7 people and just barely enough food was normal.

The mineral and biological wealth of the North American continent, supplemented by the stolen wealth of the undeveloped world, was so great that just the splashes from the carrying bucket soaked the people. Those with serious psychopathic greed feverously gathered all that they could get, but were easily seen and somewhat easily constrained, though, perhaps more importantly, they needed the American people and, especially, they needed the people to need them. Not that they always remembered; it was possible to remind them.

But with the last half of the last century has come an explosion of transportation and communication technology, the imminence of peak everything, the obvious near-term end of population growth and consequential end of economic growth binges; it was becoming increasingly clear that the bubble of American popular sanctity and security would have to end for the psychopathically greedy and their attendants to avoid sharing.

And they are frantic to avoid sharing. If sharing were to start, even a little bit, then the gates would be torn open and, horror of horrors, the elites would have to begin to confront the possibility of normalcy. And living like the rest of humanity is not on the table, the options have been thought through and are being put in place. There is always the moment, as a plan begins to be implemented, when all the participants can see what is happening; we may not like it, may be in denial for a time, but we know.

As our certainty in our American greatness and personal safety begins to weaken we cry out our old phrases, the ones that we were taught by the economic and political elite: “economic growth, personal responsibility, free market, free trade, greed is good, pro-life, don’t tax the job creators:” like children who, when they suddenly feel out of favor and in danger of loosing parental protection, search for just the right thing to say and do to return to good graces. But these phrases are out of date, are of no interest. And we are bewildered: one says to the other, “I still love you.” and it is replied, “But, I no longer love you.”

The powerful no longer need us, at least not as they did in the past; the American people have become fungible. Germany still needs Germans; if all the Germans were to disappear there would be no Germany, but if Americans were to disappear they would just be replaced with new ones from all over just like in the beginning, and just like “in the beginning,” stubborn ones who stayed on would have to be reeducated into the new society. The economic superstructure has come not to care who is running around on the streets and fields below so long as the running around is in all the desired directions.

The good cop/bad cop routine of the Democratic/Republican party proves that the people cannot yet be completely ignored, but the time is getting closer when we, common folk in general, will have experiences like the people of Chile, Argentina, China, Kenya, Iraq, Egypt and dozens of other places where the elites don’t feel the need to hide their intentions.

My childhood conundrums have been largely cleared up. The “normalcy” of my youth and early years was really not normal at all, but life in a very special protected community, one over which I either never had or had given up influence. The American Dream of more and better every year should have tipped all of us off to the con game, that we were being used and that there would be a judgment day. All that was required was Life Magazine or National Geographic and a newspaper or a radio.

There is still the opportunity to remake the place that we live, this country; not into the country that it was (or what we thought it was), that was and is a lie, but into something more real. There is still great power in the people, great energy when the TV is turned off. There are ideas and many millions of available ‘man-hours.’ First, however, it is necessary to see ourselves with honesty and reality, and there is where I despair.

I remembered this incident while reading Joe Allen’s newest book People Wasn’t Made To Burn. The story therein is of a man, James Hickman, who loses two of his children in a fire that was almost certainly set by his landlord as a means of chasing the tenants from the building so that he could increase his income. At the time of the fire, the living conditions were already unsafe and unhealthy, yet greed compelled by the desire to increase profit rendered any concerns about this irrelevant. His children’s deaths eventually drove Mr. Hickman into such depths of depression that he killed the landlord. After seeing justice for his children’s death denied by the system, Hickman saw no other course but to administer his own. The murder of the landlord inspired a movement to defend Mr. Hickman and change the nature of rental housing in Chicago. Allen takes this tragic story and renders it into a chilling narrative that reads like a novel. Simultaneously, Allen’s description of the efforts undertaken by socialists and others in Hickman’s defense read like an organizing primer.

It was the presence of socialists and other like-minded folks that made sure that the movement against the prosecution of Hickman was bigger than Hickman or his act. Under the direction of these activists, the movement around Hickman’s defense became an indictment of a system that let slumlords get away with murder. During the period that this story takes place there were so-called covenant laws that forbade blacks from renting in certain neighborhoods, thereby allowing unscrupulous landlords to charge exorbitant rents for buildings they did not even attempt to maintain. This aspect of legal institutional racism endangered the poor, especially African-Americans.

Furthermore, it was the system of profit that encouraged landlords to let their properties slip into dangerous disrepair while overcharging their tenants. It was also the system of profit that encouraged corruption amongst the very officials hired to guarantee safe living conditions. As labor leader Willoughby Abner told a rally on the opening day of Hickman’s trial: “The same government which failed to heed the need of Hickman and millions of other Hickmans is now trying to convict Hickman for its own crimes, its own failures.” Indeed, it is that system that continues to insure that abuses like this continue to this day.

Allen has written a masterpiece of historical narrative. The story of James Hickman and his family is an emotionally wrought story on its own. Allen’s retelling leaves none of that emotion out. Although it is history he is writing down, the manner of the telling makes that history as current as the latest breaking news. The book is further enhanced by the inclusion of artist Ben Shahn’s illustrations reprinted from a 1947 Harper’s magazine feature about the Hickman case. Allen ends his story with a description of a 2010 fire in Cicero, Illinois, which is right outside of Chicago. There were no fire escapes in the building and it was overcrowded. The people who lived there were violating occupancy laws because they could not afford separate apartments. That fire killed seven people and was found to be deliberately set by the landlord and his maintenance man. This time around the authorities were able to get an indictment of the men responsible for the deaths. In fact, the prosecution intends to seek the death penalty. However, the system that Willoughby Abner said “failed to heed the need of Hickman and millions of other Hickmans” continues to force people to live in unsafe living conditions while making it likely that unscrupulous landlords will continue to choose profits over the safety of those who rent from them. Indeed, it will continue to make it likely that certain landlords would rather burn their properties than take care of them.