Newsletter name brainstorm: Amateur Hour, Many Hats, Both/And, Take it or Leave it, Unsolicited Advice.
Both/And: Often, the struggle for justice and the search for a spiritual life are considered somewhat disparate. Not as a rule — there have always been individuals and religious institutions imbued with and informed by political, economic, and social justice. Cultivating compassion in the heart, clarity in the mind, and gratitude in the . . . stomach?, strengthens one’s ability to effectively work for love, peace, and equity in society. Sometimes politics feel like a fiery bowel movement, because what’s going on is spicy. My aim is not to inflame or enrage but to engage with the same ol’ dang pangs, for change!
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Wittgenstein proposed that some problems are better to dissolve than to solve. Past problems often fade over time, as we grow and are able to see them from new perspectives. Nature also gives us the sense that things unfold in their own ways on their own time.
But what cannot dissolve, what lacks the conditions to dissolve like plastic mountains in landfills or Tums in the desert, must be solved. And our current situation of extreme economic inequality, far from appearing to dissolve, only shows signs of increasing.
The majority of Americans would like a society with less inequality, with the majority of republicans now favoring the $15/hour minimum wage. Richard Wolff gives these statistics to illustrate the extreme inequality worldwide and in America:
The 68 richest people in the world own more wealth than the bottom half of the world’s population.
The richest 10% of adults own 86% of global household wealth, while the bottom half owns 1%.
The wealthiest 10% in the world own 3,000 times more wealth than the bottom 10%.
And in America, the top 1% of Americans own 43% of the stocks and bonds, while the bottom 60% of Americans own 7% of stocks and bonds
To put it another way; if you made $10,000 every single day since July 4, 1776, you still wouldn’t have $1 billion today. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk each have over $180 billion dollars, enough money to easily pay the rental debts currently facing 20,000,000 Americans.
How do we explain such gross inequality? A Marxist explanation goes something like this. Marx defines capitalism as the unequal relation between workers and owners. Capitalism evolved out of feudalism, which was defined by the relationship of lord and serf, which evolved out of slavery, defined by the master and slave relationship. As in with the previous economic systems, capitalism’s defining relationship contains an inherent power difference between the two classes, with exploitation of workers (the proletariat) by those who bought and sold their labor-power (the capitalists). Marx defines capitalists as those who own the means of production — they own the machines, the factories, they get to decide what the business makes, who does which jobs, where they do the work, how much everybody gets paid, and so on. The proletariat by definition create enough goods to sustain their position, as well as a surplus, which is extracted by the capitalist. So the proletariat sells their labor for a fraction of its value.
Marx advocated for re-structuring society so that workers could democratically and collectively decide what they made, how it was done, and how much everybody got paid. It's not everybody having the same amount of money, it's democracy in action. Historic attempts to move beyond capitalism can teach us what works and what doesn’t — and a major impediment to socialist experiments has been American corporate and government interventions.
Learning where our food comes from both turned me into a vegan and towards supporting countries’ self-determination. Our bananas come from Latin America, countries like Ecuador, Honduras, Colombia, and Costa Rica, grown and picked by workers living in what we would certainly define as poverty. American military intervention worldwide, carried out under the guise of spreading freedom, are actually indifferent to the will and interests of the people. The true motives behind these interventions are not hard to see.
Take Guatemala. American executives at United Fruit Company, looking to maximize profits, realized it would be in their best economic interests to pay as little as possible for production of their product. How could they cut back, save money? By keeping wages as low as possible and neglecting environmental and safety concerns. Their economic interest was threatened in 1951 by the country’s first ever democratically-elected president, with his popular policies for a minimum wage and universal rights. So United Fruit Company’s lobbyists got to work, persuading both Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Dwight Eisenhower to authorize CIA operations to topple Guatemala’s leadership.
What was the outcome? Well, good news and bad news. United Fruit Company was successfully able to get rid of those pesky popular reforms that would’ve left them paying a minimum wage for labor. So what’s the bad news? The CIA-trained, armed, and funded militia assumed dictatorial powers, banned opposition parties, tortured and imprisoned political opponents, and reversed the social reforms of the revolution, giving way to a nearly 40-year civil war in Guatemala.
Milton Friedman, perhaps the most influential economist in the 20th century, said “the social responsibility of a corporation is to maximize profits for its shareholders.” Friedman’s idea is ingrained in our American thinking and lies at the root of many of our societal woes. It illuminates the overlap between capitalist business interests and government efforts to oppose “communism” and favor “free trade.”
Does a Guatemalan working full-time, who has their surplus value (extra $ made from their labor) extracted by a corporation’s owners and shareholders, deserve to afford decent housing, to have access to safe working conditions? What about to have a say in determining company policies, whether or not they are strapped with the backpack of Round-up? Did Guatemalans suggest payment of 60 cents per hour, only to be thrilled to receive 75 cents? Were they disappointed the owners set the child labor age limit at eight years old instead of creating jobs for five and six year olds? No, they were never asked. And when the people elected a government to carry out their will to basic rights, that government was overthrown by external forces. This is a standard example of relations between those who own the businesses (the capitalists) and the workers (the proletariat) on an international level.
The most recent cover of the New Yorker
We see similar class warfare in America. We see it in our prisons, where inmates have the free choice (if they’re lucky) to sell their labor for roughly a dollar an hour (if they’re lucky). We see it in major companies: last month, Amazon was caught stealing $61.7 million in drivers’ tips over the past two years, intensifying unionizing efforts among Amazon workers in Alabama. We see it in anti-worker legislation: last November, California passed Prop 22 after Uber and Lyft carried out a $200 million propaganda campaign. The proposition exempts companies from providing gig economy workers with basic wages, benefits, and job security. And we see it in issues of environmental justice, where Chicago residents have been on a hunger strike for a month in the SouthEast Side to oppose a metal-shredding factory opening in a low-income Latino community already filled with polluting industries.
It’s not hard to imagine, if the mass of people who drove for Lyft and Uber were able to collectively decide, they would not choose to eliminate their health care. Or that if Amazon drivers each had one vote in a democratic process, they wouldn’t agree to have $61.7 million in tips stolen from their paychecks.
A prime example of environmental exploitation with utter disregard for suffering is seen in the factory farming industry. Cows massively forcibly inseminated by machines, corralled with cattle prods and boots, dragged by the ear from their birth to their death and stuffed with so much feed and hormones that they consequently also need to be stuffed with antibiotics to keep from dying before reaching optimum standards. All the while their fecal matter and antibiotic-filled blood poison the rivers of our country. This utter (udder?) inhumanity is reflected in American imperial practice, where profits are maximized and power is maintained through violence, whatever the cost.
Power within America is also maintained by violence when propaganda fails to maintain order. We watched Judas and the Black Messiah the other week (9/10, would watch again), which tells the story of the FBI infiltrating the Black Panthers and assassinating the 21-year-old visionary Fred Hampton. An ex-undercover officer’s deathbed confession came to light last week, telling of the FBI and police’s plot to assassinate Malcolm X, a leader as well as a husband and father of six girls.
These stories are a part of our history, from a time where the life of a human with Black skin did not carry the social capital that the Black Lives Matter movement today demands. Understanding political hits, both at home and abroad, helps us to contextualize and understand how power functions in America. They are truths as valuable to us as our knowledge and application of them. And if we forget, or never learn, history is bound to repeat.
We have a gift in the 1971 Pentagon Papers. The Vietnam War, which went on for over a decade and cost 60,000 American lives, involved political leaders and key decision-makers routinely lying to Americans about a war they didn’t believe they could win. They were blinded by anti-communist sentiment and economic interests (again, where anti-communist sentiment ends and economic interests begin is hard to tell), and had no understanding of the will of the Vietnamese people. The North Vietnamese were committed to determine their own democracy alongside the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. Meanwhile, American officials were unable to rouse their own troops to care about the war — neither our own troops nor the US-trained and armed South Vietnamese.
50 years later, another gift. The Washington Post obtained and released “The Afghanistan Papers” in 2019, containing over 2,000 pages of internal government documents. The resemblance is uncanny — government officials throughout three presidencies (Bush, Obama, and Trump) routinely lied to the American people about making progress when there was a general consensus that the war was unwinnable. To quote Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general and the White House’s Afghan war czar under Bush and Obama, “[w]e were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”
What was the effect of the war on Afghanistan? The war fueled rampant corruption in Afghanistan, with The World reporting that an estimated “40% of US aid to Afghanistan since 2001 has been pocketed by officials, gangsters, and warlords, drug lords and insurgents.” Former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker noted “You just cannot put those amounts of money into a very fragile state and society, and not have it fuel corruption. You just can't.” Hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians were killed, and tens of millions were displaced as their homes, hospitals, and infrastructure were reduced to rubble.
How much did we spend in Afghanistan? ONE TRILLION DOLLARS.
And one trillion dollars would eliminate how much of America’s collective student debt??
All of this is not to say America is evil; it is, rather, what Chomsky calls “normal imperial practice” under capitalist rule. It is to say the American people have been routinely lied to, our young men weaponized and our tax dollars extracted to further serve U.S. dominance and economic interests abroad. Ours is a system that maximizes profits at any cost. The same philosophy that opposes worker rights in Guatemala or has Latin American union leaders assassinated in Colombia (I’m looking at you, Coca-Cola) is the same that puts polluting industries in poor parts of American cities, that opposes the right to healthcare for gig workers, that incarcerates more of their population than any other nation on earth and uses their labor for profit. It’s a system defined by exploitation of the majority by a minority (James Madison spoke plainly when he said governments “ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”)
A healthy response to injustice from a functioning spirituality would be action rooted in compassion for the suffering of others. The motto of the international labor union International Workers of the World is “an injury to one is an injury to all.” Our global age sees international exploitation; we need international solidarity to support oppressed peoples worldwide. We have the Dalai Lama sharing a similar, simple message: “today our community is the whole of humanity. If we want to look after ourselves, we also have to think about what our community needs.” And Jesus calls Christians to care for those in the greatest need, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
The Apostle Paul’s famous passage on love in 1 Corinthians begins with a warning, that having correct views and meeting material conditions without love is missing the point. “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”
Marxism calls for abolishing the inherently unequal power relation between capitalists and the proletariat as a means to end the exploitation and commodification of life — whether human, animal, or Mother Earth herself. And a life in the spirit of love sensitizes our ears to cries of injustice, to hear humanity yearning to know a life full of love, joy, and peace. The struggle for justice involves working both externally to alleviate conditions that lead to systematic suffering, and working internally to make sure our actions are coming from a place not of fear and hatred — qualities that further divide us — but from a place of love and compassion, which recognizes our shared and interconnected existence. As King famously said, “darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
We hear that last week the Biden administration killed 22 Iranians in Syria, violating both domestic and international laws, and Secretary of Defense Austin expressed his confidence that he hit his target. How can we believe such a claim, when a senior counterinsurgency adviser to the military stated in the 2019 Afghanistan Report that “[e]very data point was altered to present the best picture possible. Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right”? What other response is there than to oppose the continuation of destructive, economically-driven American imperialism? What other response is there to the exploitation of the vast majority than opposing the capitalist system in which exploitation is standard practice? And internally, what other response is there but to move beyond the exploitative and self-serving tendencies in our own hearts?
The rule of the minority against the opulent majority maintains a status quo where the richest 68 people in the world have as much wealth as the bottom half of the world. We must end the system of self-interested corporate owners enforcing oppressive policy through violence and lies, and we must become witnesses to and examples of a radical love that knows no divisions of nation, race, sex, species, class, or creed. Lovers of the world, unite!
Poet’s Corner
“Me? Whee!” — Muhammad Ali
“28? Great!” — me
What I’m Consuming
Book Review: Live Not By Lies, the #1 best-selling book in Amazon’s “Fascism” category (because when you want to read a best-seller, why not turn to Amazon’s “Fascism” category?), is the urgent call to conservative evangelicals to resist the rising tide of the Radical Left’s “soft totalitarian” rule via liberal dogma and cancel culture.
The book is acutely inflammatory, which may explain its popularity. A critique of liberal practice is possible, but battling a horrible misrepresentation of Marxism and reducing the Christian faith to opposing legal abortion and reserving the right to deny service to LGBTQ individuals or call a trans-women a man is a wacky way to think about fighting for truth. What about Christians those who opposed Nazi state violence like the pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or the brothers and Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan, who opposed American state violence against the Vietnamese by pouring blood on draft papers, all of whom were imprisoned for their crime of opposing state violence?
Dreher paints a picture of good and evil, with the Conservative Evangelical movement as the noble sufferer and liberal media and higher education as part of a godless (in a bad way) societal force mandating lies and persecuting dissenters. I, for one, will never insist Dreher personally adopt she/her pronouns, and making your beliefs legislation is not the call of Christianity. 1.5/10
Time Magazine piece on the upward distribution of wealth. If income distribution looked today like it did before 1975, the bottom 99% of the population would have 50 trillion more dollars. This would be more than enough to double the median income. Enough to pay every single working American in the bottom 90% an additional $1,144 every month. An amount equivalent to an additional $10.10 to $13.50 an hour. The median income would be $57,000 a year.
“This is an America in which 47 percent of renters are cost burdened, in which 40 percent of households can’t cover a $400 emergency expense, in which half of Americans over age 55 have no retirement savings at all. This is an America in which 28 million have no health insurance, and in which 44 million underinsured Americans can’t afford the deductibles or copays to use the insurance they have.”
Where the article fails is in its analysis (ie, doesn’t mention Capitalism). Ctrl+F search “we chose” to see the paragraph where it sounds like Americans chose policies to erode their minimum wage, cripple their unions, allow monopolies and rewriting of tax brackets to benefit the rich. Yup, that’s what we all thought sounded really great!
NYTimes reports Sperm count down 60% in males since 1973, women are experiencing more miscarriages, and all parties have seen declining egg and sperm quality. Talk about a kick in the nuts! Wanna Build Back Better seed? Store food in glass and don’t microwave foods in plastic or with plastic wrap on top. Avoid pesticides and drug usage.
Naomi Klein on Democracy Now! A great interview on deregulation and why we need a Green New Deal.
An interview with the theologian, professor, and activist titan Cornel West on why Harvard denied him tenure (hint: it involves opposing American imperialism). The man is an example of what speaking truth to power with love looks like.
Power to the people, with love,
Luke