Banana Split Economics

We may never get out of the woods
To make and export our goods
If amidst all the sobs
We export our jobs
Instead of our handiwork
For that’s where big troubles lurk
The top banana wears a crown
And the rest of us wear a frown
Immersed in our tears and bankrupt
To support the rich and inept


One of the telling differences between the mixed democracies of Mexico and Central America and our own democratic republic has been the relatively high upward mobility of our citizens. Much of the mobility came from education and the public school system of the United States as well as excellent colleges and universities that came within reach of millions of citizens after World War II. Perhaps the single most influential factor was the GI Bill that provided the technical education that propelled the United States through the technology explosion of the 50s and 60s. We invested locally and gained internationally.

The federal government was the underwriter of advanced education and made that education easily affordable and within the reach of nearly everyone socially and even geographically. The technological cauldron was pretty much just that. It was a heated vessel that combined investment, education and labor here in the United States. While other pots were warming, our cauldron boiled over until foreign investment caught up with our market economy. Some of their catching up was through central planning as in China, India and to a lesser extent Japan where social status was subordinated to the needs of each nation to become competitive in a world marketplace. After WW II, the US had a comparative advantage in that we did not suffer major damage or loss of the capital equipment and other resources to compete in the world market. Given extended optimism and insufficient investment, that advantage eventually became a disadvantage as countries that replaced their capital infrastructure did so with more modern and efficient systems and equipment.

The economic disadvantage was made worse by some decisions in the 50s and 60s regarding wages and benefits that sought to give workers medical benefits instead of wage increases. Large corporations discouraged government investment in tax supported medical care. Two decades later, the Reagan Administration changed Medicare policy from payment based on treatment to payment based on diagnosis. Partially due to this, and due to the expansion of diagnostic techniques and equipment, diagnosis became a growth industry within medicine. Myopic labor unions did not fully consider the impact of technology on shrinking job numbers and they did not call for systemic changes in either wages or healthcare. Most developed nations adopted government-controlled healthcare when the US decided (by default) to maintain healthcare provided by corporations, mostly manufacturing. This later became unmanageable when costs skyrocketed and corporations began to cut back on inflationary benefits. The “last straw” for this rickety structure was the massive sea change resulting from labor being competed on a world-wide basis where ever lower level economies provided labor at lower and lower costs. At this point in 2010, not even China can compete in areas such as textiles and has closed hundreds of textile mills. Pakistan, a more recent entry to textiles has already had to close 600 of its 1,000 textile mills. Some of our recently purchased furniture was made in Vietnam. Years ago, it was made in New England. Later, it was made in North Carolina (a right to work state) and then in Europe, but the inexorable beat for lower labor costs accelerated the migration of manufacturing centers to a dizzying pace. Now, unions represent less than 13% of all jobs and far less in manufacturing. We got what we asked for: highly mobile workers and competition for work. Unions are powerless to slow the process. The trend is clear and the only bright spots over these decades has been technology surges when new technology combined with investment capital provided a respite in the outflow of good jobs from the US and the importing of cheap labor from Mexico and Central America. Eventually, Silicon Valley became just another brief stop on the Pony Express to economic oblivion. Executives like Carly Fiorina became famous for exporting high tech jobs (about 32,000 on her watch as CEO of HP). Unfortunately, once the process begins, it cascades and cannot be stopped without both courage and capital. Fiorina was fired and HP stock shot up 7% the following day, but the damage was done and only determined and focused management and investment helped bring HP back to life.

Despite her faulty management of HP, Fiorina was given a golden parachute worth about $20 million. Realistically, if given the opportunity, throngs could have ruined the company for half that severance. All this is describing a situation where our nation is often beatifying CEOs that appear to have only their own interests at heart. It was during the six turbulent years of Fiorina’s leadership that HP circumvented laws preventing the sale of high tech equipment to Iran while simultaneously exporting jobs. Is this in our national interest? These sainted CEOs are highly compensated for failure, perhaps because they have become our new upper class. They have been immunized from their disasters and rewarded for merely being CEOs. They are the lords and ladies of industry. What is more ironic is that now Ms. Fiorina, who seems unable to get another job in private industry, is seeking to become a senator using her name recognition despite the fact that it is negative and that she rarely, if ever, voted as part of the political process.

It is this penultimate social development that brings us back to the banana split. This style of social promotion varies significantly from that practiced in many schools. It is more akin to the social structure of the banana republics where the upper class rules politically as well as economically and that class has no need to take risks. Success becomes an element of birth and not of performance. They invest less in creation of meaningful jobs, but take control of businesses that are essentially monopolies or oligarchies with minimum risk and minimum investment. Carlos Slim is the wealthiest man in Mexico (and the world) with opportunities to assist his own nation to generate meaningful work. He sought and obtained privatization of the telecommunications in Mexico and that acquisition alone raised his net worth by nearly $20 billion. But then he also invested $250 million in the New York Times. While there is nothing wrong legally or even ethically with that purchase, it does nothing for the thousands of Mexicans who seek work here in the US due to lack of opportunity in Mexico. The “final” development is the increasing restriction of “banana republic” economics that effectively throttles the flow of youth into higher education that is needed for social and economic growth by the US. Once that process is nurtured, then relatively few families control the politics and economics of a nation and social striation is solidified. At that end point, the top banana gets economic and political control and takes fewer risks. Education becomes an artifact of the upper class and stagnation of economics is a natural result. The major variable becomes the downward pressure on wages.

The US needs to invest in technology and education and to keep the channels for vertical social movement open for all her citizens. Merit must replace the current system of rewarding birthright in industry. These are economic imperatives more than social engineering. Otherwise the lords and ladies get the ice cream sundae including the banana and the rest get the peel. Watch your step. Vote to support higher education. It may save your job through energy and innovation instead of stagnation and competing your salary.




Peace,
George Giacoppe
17 August 2010

On Remembering Whence We Came

 
 
Given that it’s Memorial Day, when we’re supposed to remember sacrifice, and given that we have a Black American now presiding in the White House, it struck me as an apt occasion to remember just where this mix of black and white derives from. I know of no better place to start than the recent book by Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello, recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history. It fully deserves the honor, for what Gordon-Reed has done is to provide us with a look inside the once-secret life of the household run by that quintessential American, Thomas Jefferson. Author of the Declaration of Independence, third President of the United States and founder of the University of Virginia, designer of his Monticello residence, Jefferson was our true Renaissance man, especially in those areas related to freedom and the democratic ideal. And yet, what Gordon-Reed shows us is that that household, Monticello (itself an icon of liberty and freedom), was staffed by over 80 slaves (Jefferson owned 200 for his various estates), and more, was inhabited by Jefferson’s personal concubine and slave, the beautiful Sally Hemings, who bore him several children.
            Notwithstanding such sensational facts, this is not a history that revels in what in Jefferson’s time amounted to a public scandal. Quietly, and in beautifully shaped prose, Gordon-Reed simply takes us through the domestic history of Jefferson’s family, including the family of his first wife Martha Wayles (who was “given” Sally Hemings as a wedding present), and shows us how slavery worked in those days in Virginia. In so doing, she leads us to an appreciation of what it must have been like to have endured the conflicts and agonies of decision that faced not only Jefferson himself, but those of his concubine, her enslaved family who lived at Monticello as well, and the children she bore him. Along the way, we learn amazing, and to most of us, little-known facts about slavery, how it worked, and the diabolical logic that kept it intact for more than half of our history.
            Consider, for example, how convenient it was for Virginia to change its inheritance laws: where English tradition stipulated that you “were what your father was,” Virginia, in 1662,  adopted the Roman rule partus sequitur ventrem, “which says that you were what your mother was.” And why? Because slave owners, realizing that large numbers of African women had been impregnated (raped) by their white owners, would have borne children who, under the English law, would have been free like their white fathers. Under the new law, however, they remained slaves like their black mothers, and hence property owned by the master. The Hemingses of the title were a case in point: Elizaberth Hemings, herself the offspring of a white father, became the concubine of her owner, John Wayles, a white landowner who had earned money in the slave trade. Wayles and Hemings produced six “mulatto” children, among them Sally Hemings, born in 1773 (even with three white grandparents, she remained “black” and a slave.) Adding to the legal plight of slaves was the fact that not only could no word said by a black person be used against a white person in court, but a child born out of wedlock was filius nullius, the child of no one.
            Jefferson’s wife, Martha, was John Wayles’ legal daughter, and hence the beneficiary of much of the Wayles estate. This came, with their marriage in 1772, to Jefferson, along with most of the Hemingses including Martha’s half-sister, Sally Hemings. When Martha Wayles Jefferson died in childbirth in 1782, she left three children by Jefferson, as well as her half-sister, Sally, then nine years old. A year before he was named minister to France in 1785, Jefferson moved to Paris. He brought with him Sally’s older brother James, to be trained as his chef in French cuisine. But while he was away, Jefferson’s daughter, Lucy, then a two- year-old, died of whooping cough. Distraught, Jefferson insisted on having his remaining daughter, Polly, brought to Paris to be with him and her sister Patsy. Polly’s traveling companion would be none other than Sally Hemings, then about 14 years old.
            It was during this Paris interlude, according to most biographers, that the slave-girl Sally Hemings, Jefferson’s half sister-in-law, became his concubine. We know this partly because of reports that when Jefferson and his family returned to Monticello, Sally Hemings was pregnant. The situation, already deliciously complex, was further complicated by the fact that French laws decreed that any New World slave who set foot on French soil could, if he or she petitioned for it, become a free French citizen. Sally Hemings, though a young slave girl, thus had some leverage over her lover/master, knew it, and used it. Here is how Madison Hemings, one of the offspring of the Jefferson-Hemings liaison, described it years later:
            “But during that time my mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine, and when he was called back home she was enciente by him. He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with him, but she demurred. She was just beginning to understand the French language well, and in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved. So she refused to return with him. To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years. In consequence of his promises, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia.” (Gordon-Reed, p. 326)
Though this child conceived in Paris died, Sally Hemings subsequently bore Thomas Jefferson several more children. Of course, neither the President nor his early biographers publicly admitted it, but in 1802, the first public disclosure appeared in a paper called the Richmond Recorder, written by one James Callender: “It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is SALLY.” (p. 557). Until recently, this and other rumors were the only indication that the writer of the most renowned paean to human freedom, the Declaration of Independence, not only kept slaves, but had a forty-year intimate relationship with one of them.
            Gordon-Reed thus takes us through one of the most richly improbable domestic dramas in our history. By juxtaposing the life of an almost sainted American founding father with the lives of the people he kept with him, working for him (he made carpenters of two of his sons by Sally, Beverly and Madison), sleeping with him, bearing his children, and finally, freeing them on his terms only after his death, she gives us a sense of the true, if hidden history of this nation. The ringing words “conceived in liberty” begin to take on new meaning. So does the title often given to Jefferson, the “apostle of freedom,” for Gordon-Reed ends with the question of why the great man did not see fit to free Sally Hemings, or any of the other Hemingses, while he was still alive, or even formally in his will. Her answer involves the benefits he derived from having Sally Hemings bound to him, and the damnation of public opinion if he freed her publicly (the law said an owner had to detail how he would provide for a freed slave, as well as petition the Virginia legislature to give that ex-slave permission to remain, freed, in the state) :
            “The only way for a man to control a free woman was to marry her, which he could not do. Selfishness and self-absorption seem far too inadequate as reasons for the way Jefferson treated these members of the Hemings family. There is often great power in simplicity, and the simple terrible fact is that the law vested Jefferson, and other slave owners, with the powers of a tyrant, as he said himself. This domestic tyrant tried to mitigate the meaning of that reality by being as benign as he could. That made it easier for him to see himself as a good man as he indulged his impulses and met his needs—economic, social, and affective—through his control of these family members, to whom he was tied by years of intimate acquaintance, experiences, and blood. He created his own version of slavery that he could live in comfortably with the Hemingses. It suited him. There was never any serious chance that he would have given this up. (p. 640)
 
Still, Sally Hemings, because of her “bargain” with Jefferson on returning from France, did better than most enslaved Africans. She, and they, were “given their time,” i.e. freed. In 1826 she went to live in Charlottsville, shortly thereafter moving into his home with her son Madison, and in the 1830 census, was counted, along with her sons, as free white persons. Three of her children would follow her to live in the white world, while one remained in the black world.
            As to the other Hemingses, who lacked the same leverage, when Monticello was sold in 1831, several were sold at auction. Some ran away. The fate of others is unknown. Some sense of the inhuman obstacles facing them, and all slaves, can be gleaned from the fate of Joseph Fossett, one of the Hemings children. Fossett managed, after he was freed, to gain ownership of five of his children and four of his grandchildren. That is, in order to free his children, he had to BUY them. Gordon-Reed explains:
             To avoid application of the 1806 law, he [Fossett] kept them in legal bondage until he decided in 1837 that it was time for a change. In September, he formally emancipated his own family members.
 
This is one of the many benefits of this deeply revealing and troubling book—illustrating how the fiendish legal system created by the slave-owning South proved, in many ways, as binding to African Americans as their chains. A “nation of laws,” indeed.
 
Lawrence DiStasi

How Could they Do It?

            Increasingly, we humans are faced with acts that seem unexplainable. How, we ask, could the Nazi Holocaust, the genocides in Armenia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and elsewhere, and most recently, the torture committed by United States troops at Abu Ghraib, have happened? With this in mind, I recently read Iris Chang’s disturbing account of yet another genocidal killing spree, that of Japanese troops against the residents of the Chinese city of Nanking in 1937, all of it detailed in Chang’s The Rape of Nanking (Basic Books, 1997). And the question that Chang poses in at least two places in her book is the one haunting us all these days: How could they do it? How could otherwise rational human beings lose all sense of respect and restraint in order to torture, humiliate, dismember, and violate in every way fellow human beings, and on such a grand scale? Chang offers not one but several answers to explain the events in Nanking—where as many as 300,000 Chinese were slaughtered in a matter of weeks. Among them are the absolute deadliness of absolute power; the specific training which the Japanese military imposed on its soldiers, training them with exercises meant to instill killing instincts; the suppressed rage of those soldiers, themselves treated like dirt by their officers; the “frightening ease” with which all of us can witness and accept genocide as long as the danger is perceived to be far away. All these, and others, especially the training which portrays the enemy as “sub-human,” no doubt operate. But I think there is one more, a usually unspoken one, which relates to some recent thoughts of mine on betrayal (see the blogs, Traitors I and II).
            I am referring to a sense one can get when reading about truly unspeakable acts—the vindictive manner with which Japanese soldiers cut off the heads of all Chinese, including women they had just savagely raped; the torture and brutality imposed on little children, pregnant mothers, helpless old people, none of whom could have possibly represented a threat—that more than the numbing of civilized behavior or empathy is at work, that some unspoken animus is at play here. It is as if the soldier, the perpetrator, is blaming his victims, blaming them for being what they are. There is the distinct sense in this, in all sadism perhaps, that the perpetrator is blaming the victim for being something disgusting, something humiliating. The soldier/torturer, that is, first puts the victim in a situation of complete powerlessness, and then blames him or her for being powerless. For groveling. For not standing up to defend himself, but rather begging for his life, demonstrating his willingness to submit to any humiliation in order to be spared.
            And what we hear is the interior monologue of the torturer: you disgust me. You are beneath contempt, and therefore do not deserve to live. But why? we want to ask. What is so disgusting? And I think the answer is that you, as a victim, my victim, remind me of what I am, of what I am trying desperately not to be: completely vulnerable, a being who is a hair’s breadth away, always, from dying, from groveling in shit and humiliation myself. This, I think, is the deep fear that is raised by the sight of a completely helpless victim. And, at the same time, what is also raised is an exhilaration that I can, at least for the moment, rise above that horribly rejected condition by treating you as dirt. By destroying you, sending you back to that nothingness from which you came. That is to say, we, our conscious selves, always yearn to be invulnerable, always strive to position ourselves above the mess and perilous brevity of our existence, to see ourselves as somehow not the barely cobbled-together, watery beings we know we are. And the yearning runs on fear.
            In a real way, I think, this fear is connected to the fear of reversion I’ve referred to in my ‘Traitor’ series. We all know we are mud and dirt and slime, disgusting from the point of view of so-called “civilization” where we do everything to mute and disguise that origin. We also all know that our determination to pretend to be substantial, permanent, solid, to make our civilized works permanent and solid, stems from our evanescence, from the paltry nature of what we are and how pitifully brief and shaky is our appearance here. Iris Chang refers to this several times in her book, when she comments again and again on the “thin veneer of civilization” that can vanish so easily and quickly in a genocide. And that is true. And we all know it. And it terrifies us, the knowledge that any of us, all of us, can so easily revert to a state of anarchy, powerlessness, shapelessness. And again, it is precisely that terror which is turned on the victim, turned into rage against the victim who reminds us of our terror. Of the imminence of our reversion to mud and slime and liquefaction.
            This, then, is what I think lies at the heart of all this horror and brutality, this exultation in rape and dismemberment and torture and murder in the cruel fashion of which only humans are capable. ‘Don’t remind me of what I am. I hate you for reminding me of what I am. And therefore I will reduce you to the most abject piece of shit and trash imaginable.’ The Nazis did this constantly, routinely to the Jews in concentration camps. And, as Iris Chang demonstrates with chapter and verse, the Japanese in Nanking did this just as routinely. It wasn’t just killing soldiers or civilians who might be dangerous. It was humiliating them even after death. Most were dumped into the Yangtze River, which ran blood for weeks. But the most vivid depiction of what I am referring to occurred in the revolting story of the Japanese dumping the bodies of dead Chinese into pits—the pits which the Chinese had earlier dug in most roads in the vain hope that they could hinder the advance of Japanese tanks. The conquering Japanese responded with the genocidal cruelty which Nanking symbolizes: they filled the pits with Chinese bodies, some still alive, and took pleasure in running over these pits of piled-up bodies now functioning as dirt, with their tanks and trucks. Horror. But more than horror, this cruel inversion of decent burial turned the Chinese bodies into the deepest form of humiliation: ‘You are nothing but roadfill. Roadkill. Inanimate shapeless matter of the most worthless kind.’
            Something more than the numbing of civilized behavior in war is needed to explain such horror. Something, I would submit, like what I have referred to above. Something that all of us, however well trained, ignore at our peril.
 
Lawrence DiStasi
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