Independence Day

On this Fourth of July, the holiday when Americans wave flags and march in parades and sing God Bless America while eating hot dogs, and speechify about why this is the greatest country on God’s earth—on this day I am thinking something else. I am thinking of how the Declaration we profess to celebrate as one of the greatest pieces of rhetoric ever penned—by Thomas Jefferson, probably our greatest citizen ever—flew in the face of what Jefferson himself, a slave owner, knew: that saying “all men are created equal” was a lie (and not just because it excluded half the human race, which it did). It was a lie because at the very time he penned it, many of the colleagues pledging their sacred honor to defend the newly birthing country were slave owners like himself. And that these same men would shortly, after winning from Great Britain their precious independence, collude in a Constitution that sanctioned the enslavement of black Africans in direct contradiction to their fine words condemning their “enslavement” by Great Britain, and coldly count them, the African slaves, as three-fifths of a human being for purposes of representation in their hallowed House of Representatives. It is a hypocrisy, a contradiction, a violation of every law of man and god they so piously claimed to revere, and it has persisted, in spite of a violent war and continual legislation attempting to end it, for nearly 250 years.

I am also thinking of the brave souls who have taken this document seriously, and are even now paying the price for that position. I mean Pfc Bradley Manning—the man who released the stunning video of outright murder by helicopter in Iraq, as well as thousands of battle-action and state department documents to Wikileaks that have proved excruciatingly embarrassing to those in power—who is now on trial for his life in a military court. I mean Julian Assange, the man who set up the site known as Wikileaks, and who is spending his second year in the Ecuadorian embassy in London because he knows if he steps out, he will be sent to Sweden to be prosecuted not for alleged sexual harassment but for his role in exposing United States’ crimes. I mean Edward Snowden, the former CIA analyst and NSA-contracted worker for Booz Allen Hamilton, who released thousands of secret documents to Glenn Greenwald of England’s Guardian, revealing the wholesale spying by the NSA and its contractors on Americans and just about everyone else in the world—who is now a man without a country being hounded by the US authorities for violating the 1917 law known as the Espionage Act.

All of these people, like Daniel Ellsberg before them, are being pursued as if they were the most dangerous of terrorists for the crime of letting the American people know what their government is doing. They are speaking out. They have taken seriously the right stated in the First Amendment that speech is protected by the Constitution of the United States, and that their duty as citizens is to let their fellow citizens know what their government is doing behind closed doors. That those hitherto secret actions of their government are dangerous and criminal and should be known by the American people. For this they have been charged with “unauthorized communication” of the information they have been privy to, and theft of classified government property. Many in Congress and elsewhere have also charged them with providing aid and comfort to the enemy, i.e. being traitors to their country, which is punishable by death. The military is trying to pin this charge on Bradley Manning. But the truth is that what he and the others are really being charged with is a form of free speech. A form of truth-telling mandated by the Nuremberg precedents. These truths, though, have not set them free. These truths have set upon them the all-powerful forces of the most all-powerful country in the history of the world. For these truths have proven embarrassing to that all-powerful country and its alleged leaders, and therefore must be punished, must be discouraged, must be exterminated from the armory of those who would dare to tell the truth in the future. Which is why most other leaders around the world have kept their distance from these truth-tellers. Incendiaries, spies, war profiteers, assassins—these are acceptable to and welcomed by leaders everywhere. But truth-tellers, as Socrates learned two thousand years ago, are anathema. A terror.

In this regard, Oliver Stone & Peter Kuznick’s Untold History of the United States has reminded me of the words of the great labor leader of the early part of the 20^th century, EugeneVictor Debs. The uncanny thing about Debs is that his words protesting war and corporate corruption in America could have been written yesterday. Debs, for example, was actually arrested and tried under the very same act, The Espionage Act, that is now being used to prosecute Edward Snowden. Debs was one of its first victims. Having already been targeted as a rabble rouser (he had helped found the IWW and the American Railway Union), and having run for President on the Socialist Party ticket in 1900, 1904, 1908 and 1912, Debs was speaking out regularly against American involvement in World War I. One speech in particular, given in Canton Ohio in June 1918, led the authorities—who had passed the Espionage Act to discourage just such “traitorous speech”—to arrest and try him for sedition. Debs hired no lawyers and called no witnesses; rather, he defended himself not with denials of his guilt but with the logic and truth of his position. It cost him. In September of 1918, Debs was found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Undaunted, in 1920 he ran for President again, this time from his prison cell in Atlanta’s Federal Prison. He also appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court, which ruled that while his words did not technically violate the Espionage Act, they had the effect of obstructing the draft, since he had praised some of those already imprisoned for resisting it. He stayed in jail, eventually to be released for time served by President Warren Harding in 1921, and died in 1926 of heart failure.

Aside from his accomplishments as an activist, it is Debs’ words that make him relevant in our time. His words, in addition to the fact that the infamous Espionage Act under which he was convicted is still being used to silence whistleblowers in America, are what I would like to highlight. Here, for instance, are some excerpts from that Canton, OH speech, excerpts that attack false patriotism of the kind we are likely to see on Independence Day, as well as war, the master class that is behind all wars, the unfairness of judges and courts, the uselessness of conventional political parties, and the murder of truth and truth-tellers.

They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. This is too much, even for a joke. But it is not a subject for levity; it is an exceedingly serious matter…

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder…And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.

To whom do the Wall Street Junkers in our country marry their daughters? After they have wrung their countless millions from your sweat, your agony and your life’s blood, in a time of war as in a time of peace, they invest these untold millions in the purchase of titles of broken-down aristocrats, such as princes, dukes, counts and other parasites and no-accounts. Would they be satisfied to wed their daughters to honest workingmen? To real democrats? Oh, no! They scour the markets of Europe for vampires who are titled and nothing else. And they swap their millions for the titles, so that matrimony with them becomes literally a matter of money.

These are the gentry who are today wrapped up in the American flag, who shout their claim from the housetops that they are the only patriots, and who have their magnifying glasses in hand, scanning the country for evidence of disloyalty, eager to apply the brand of treason to the men who dare to even whisper their opposition to Junker rule in the United Sates. No wonder Sam Johnson declared that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” He must have had this Wall Street gentry in mind, or at least their prototypes, for in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people.

… The other day they sentenced Kate Richards O’Hare to the penitentiary for five years. Think of sentencing a woman to the penitentiary simply for talking. The United States, under plutocratic rule, is the only country that would send a woman to prison for five years for exercising the right of free speech. If this be treason, let them make the most of it.

Who appoints our federal judges? The people? In all the history of the country, the working class have never named a federal judge. There are 121 of these judges and every solitary one holds his position, his tenure, through the influence and power of corporate capital. The corporations and trusts dictate their appointment. And when they go to the bench, they go, not to serve the people, but to serve the interests that place them and keep them where they are.

Why, the other day, by a vote of five to four—a kind of craps game—come seven, come ‘leven —they declared the child labor law unconstitutional—a law secured after twenty years of education and agitation on the part of all kinds of people. And yet, by a majority of one, the Supreme Court, a body of corporation lawyers, with just one exception, wiped that law from the statute books, and this in our so-called democracy, so that we may continue to grind the flesh and blood and bones of puny little children into profits for the Junkers of Wall Street. And this in a country that boasts of fighting to make the world safe for democracy! The history of this country is being written in the blood of the childhood the industrial lords have murdered. (see: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/eugenedebscantonspeech.html)

When he got to court, as noted above, Debs defended himself. A few excerpts from his words in court give an idea of the power of his oratory.

I have been accused of obstructing the war. I admit it. Gentlemen, I abhor war. I would oppose war if I stood alone…

I believe in the Constitution of the United States. Isn’t it strange that we Socialists stand almost alone today in defending the constitution of the United States? The revolutionary fathers who had been oppressed under king rule understood that free speech and free press and the right of free assemblage by the people were the fundamental principles of democratic government. The very first amendment to the constitution reads:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

That is perfectly plain English. It can be understood by a child. I believe the revolutionary fathers meant just what is here stated…That is the right that I exercised at Canton on the 16^th day of last June…

I have told you that I am no lawyer, but it seems to me that I know enough to know that if Congress enacts any law that conflicts with this provision in the Constitution, that law is void. If the Espionage law finally stands, then the Constitution of the United States is dead. If that law is not the negation of every fundamental principle established by the Constitution, then certainly I am unable to read or to understand the English language.

…With every drop of blood in my veins I despise Kaiserism and all that Kaiserism expresses and implies. I have my sympathy with the struggling, suffering people everywhere. It does not make any difference under what flag they were born, or where they live, I have sympathy with them all. I would, if I could, establish a social system that would embrace them all.

Then, after having been found guilty, and before being sentenced, Debs addressed the court again.

Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship within all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.

Finally, even though he ran for President several times, and led the fight for unions and the causes of labor, Debs expressed his suspicion of, his contempt for most leaders. This excerpt is also from his Canton Ohio Speech, June 1918: 

I never had much faith in leaders. I am willing to be charged with almost anything, rather than to be charged with being a leader. I am suspicious of leaders, and especially of the intellectual variety. Give me the rank and file every day in the week. If you go to the city of Washington, and you examine the pages of the Congressional Directory, you will find that almost all of those corporation lawyers and cowardly politicians, members of Congress, and misrepresentatives of the masses — you will find that almost all of them claim, in glowing terms, that they have risen from the ranks to places of eminence and distinction. I am very glad I cannot make that claim for myself. I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.

That was Eugene V. Debs. Everyone should read him, read his speeches, read about his dedication to the cause to which he committed his life. It was, yes, Socialism and Debs made no bones about it, nor about his belief that unions were crucial in the fight for fairness, nor that he was for cooperatives and the critical point that the fruit of labor should go to the people who do the work. Too bad there isn’t someone like him in our midst today. We could use another Eugene V. Debs, if for nothing else than to remind us what independence and free speech and courage in a public figure are really about.

Lawrence DiStasi

Two American Families

The title above is that of a Frontline documentary by the irrepressible Bill Moyers that aired last night, July 9, 2013. Needless to say, it’s a marvelous piece of work—one that Moyers and his colleague Kathleen Hughes started all the way back in 1991 when the unraveling of America’s industrial base was going into high gear. It follows two Milwaukee families—one white, one black, both with several children and houses of their own—as they move from fairly secure lower-middle class existence to near poverty after the closing of factories and then several more economic shocks culminating in the financial meltdown of 2008. In both cases, the male of the house started with a job in the manufacturing sector that once made Milwaukee a prosperous industrial city. The comparison with any number of cities in both the Midwest and the Northeast and even the South is quite obvious. Like Detroit, like Bridgeport CT where I grew up, the busy factories in these towns supported countless families in the period after World War II, providing jobs with good benefits and wages that allowed a single, usually male worker to support his family, pay a mortgage, send his children to school and college, and save for retirement. Since then, under Ronald Reagan and the conservative assault on government, unions, and the social safety net created by Democrats like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, those jobs have withered away. Corporations have been allowed to take their factories to countries like China or Bangladesh or Mexico where labor costs are a fraction of American costs. The result has been an American landscape littered with boarded-up factories, and increasingly since 2008, boarded-up houses whose one-time occupants can no longer afford the mortgages or the upkeep of neighborhoods going to seed.

Moyers takes each family in turn and shows its relative peace and prosperity in 1991. These families are not wealthy, by any means, but both live in tidy neighborhoods and both have men who work in apparently secure factory jobs. The white guy, Tony Neumann, works as a machinist in the Briggs & Stratton factory making what turns out to be the princely sum of $18 per hour, plus benefits. His wife Terry can be a stay-at-home mom, taking care of their two, then three children. On the strength of the Briggs & Stratton job, they buy a house, with a mortgage of $820 a month, and a plastic backyard pool. The African American Stanleys appear similarly prosperous at first, with Claude working a good job at the A.O. Smith factory. They have five children and Claude doubles as a preacher, then a pastor at his own tiny church. This faith sustains him and his family through very hard times, and also gives the Stanleys what appears to be a bit more of a social connection than the Neumanns—though the Neumanns are also religious, being devout Catholics.

But even before the 1990s, things begin to go sour for both families. Both men lose their good factory jobs when their factories depart for cheaper climes. Though this is a major blow, both remain positive and apply for what will be lesser jobs, hoping that something will replace the lost income. It turns out to be a vain hope: one of the points made by the documentary is that good factory jobs are leaving Milwaukee and elsewhere in the United States forever. Tony goes out right away and applies for jobs at places like Wal-Mart, Sam’s, McDonald’s and other ‘big box’ horrors, all offering less than $6 per hour. It is a huge comedown from the $18 he was making, but he keeps doing it, keeps trying to retrain himself for something a little better. Each time he finds a promising job, however, that too falls through when the factory or business closes. Knowing that the wolf is at the door (the wolf being the bank that keeps demanding the now-in-arrears mortgage payment), Kathy tries at first to sell skin-care products, something she can do from home. She ends up losing money on the venture and gives it up. She is forced to go to food banks to keep her family fed. The scene is much the same for the Stanleys. Having lost his good job, Claude takes a job waterproofing basements for less than $7/hour, not even half what he was making. It is an exhausting, grimy job but he does it with energy and eventually becomes foreman for a little more money. But with five kids to support, the Stanleys have the same trouble making the mortgage payments as the Neumanns. So Jackie, who had also worked at Briggs, finds a job selling real estate—she had been studying it even while working at Briggs when she saw the handwriting on the wall. Unable to sell in other areas of the city because of her color, she still sells a house every now and then and manages to keep her family barely above water. But then Claude contracts a lung disease and ends up in the hospital for several weeks, with a bill of over $30,000. Buoyed by faith, they manage to keep going, with the sons starting their own lawn-care service, and Claude working on a garbage truck. And on the strength of their combined drive, they even manage to send their eldest son, Keith, to Alabama State College where he somehow—borrowing on credit cards and every other means—manages to graduate. This sets them a bit apart, for at the end of the film, we see Keith having managed to find a good job working with a city councilman, owning his own house, and even supporting one of his sister’s sons. But having seen the struggle his parents went and still go through, he has refrained from marriage, fearing he might not be able to afford children of his own.

As to the Neumanns, their trajectory is much more severe. Beaten down by constant worry, Tony and Kathy finally split into divorce. By this time, their children are grown but each one seems headed for the same fate, struggling with the low-wage jobs that now dominate Milwaukee’s economy—if it can be called that. Kathy is finally unable to pay her mortgage, and despite her pleas with the bank for a modification, lands in foreclosure. The most agonizing moment is when she returns to the house that once rang with the noise of her family, now owned by an Asian couple who purchased it in foreclosure for around $40,000. Some of her last words are poignant, even tragic, acknowledging that she doesn’t think she’ll ever get back to where she was, even though she has undergone training and become an aide in a nursing facility, working the overnight shift. Salary, $11.50 an hour, plus benefits. She lives in the house of a friend, having crashed with relatives on and off since the foreclosure, the only dream she has left that of being able to buy a place in a trailer park. When asked by Moyers if she thought she’d ever be secure, she said she doubted it, given the way the economy was going. What then? asked Moyers. Just keep going, she said:

“We’ll just work until we collapse and keel over and die.”

Two American Families packs a powerful punch—at least for those who can imagine the same thing happening to them. Because that is its radical message: the American Dream—at least as it has always been touted to average Americans, that with hard work, anyone can succeed—is dead. Has been dead for quite some time. For as the financiers and banksters and CEOs and hucksters consume (or perhaps one should say “steal”) an ever greater portion of the national wealth, average Americans like the Neumanns and the Stanleys are left with the indigestible crumbs of low-wage slavery. Through no fault of their own—rather through the greed of corporatists and militarists and their precious globalization—the jobs they could once count on have disappeared. Gone for good. Without the means to a good college education, without the communal power needed to counter the satanic power of capital, they are condemned to lives of anguish, poverty, humiliation, and self-blame. And unless something drastic is done, and quickly, more and more Americans, even those who manage to borrow and work their way through college with ever mounting debts, are sure to join them.

Lawrence DiStasi

Immigrants: The New Slaves

By the border down Mexico way

We build fences like the Berlin wall

To make it harder to play

The toughest charade of all

Can you crawl despite your thirst?

Can you run despite your fear?

And will the patrol get you first

Or will you make it free and clear?

You may break your heart and die

Or break the law and try

To earn a living in the sun

But either way you’ll fry

And hiding is no fun

           

The US Senate is considering an amazing bill that would legalize standardized indentured servitude of 13 years for immigrants, where the rights of an immigrant are not only restricted, but where the immigrant would have to pay a penalty while living in the shadows and being forced to work under the table.  It is at once a travesty against humanity and simultaneously a more human alternative than the US House of Representatives that sees immigrants as a privatizing boondoggle for security and construction while forbidding entry to anybody through our south.  It means nothing that our national security threats have been mostly from the north (Canada) or from our airports or the Saudis.  Is this the best of all worlds in the land of opportunity or what?  Will either alternative preserve families?  Well, not exactly.

We hear and read virtually every reason for “sealing our borders,” but the reality is that the only border we focus on is the Mexican border.  There are some real reasons for this, however, are they reasonable?  There are millions from countries south of the United States that have a seriously impoverished class of inhabitants.  They migrate into Mexico and some stay while others continue north into the US.  The migration is a sign of human desperation and because people are desperate, they will take risks that others avoid.  Grinding poverty is an incentive for emigrating.  In 1870s Italy, people starved and the government even assisted people wanting to leave for the US or Argentina.  During the potato famine, the exodus of people from Ireland was a matter of desperate clinging to life.  In some states south of Mexico and in Mexico itself, the differential between rich and poor is sharp and vast.  The problem is economics and the reaction is not only half vast, but strangely targeted.  We will spend far more to seal a border from economic refugees than we might spend to invest in the people facing deprivation and even starvation.  We are soon to spend $46 Billion, by one recent estimate, for construction and high-tech electronic and human detection systems on our southern border.  That level of investment in education and training of our neighbors would pay high dividends and spark internal investment in agriculture and even manufacturing in poor nations.  Actually, 10% of that money expended on sustainable industries could reduce poverty and the need to emigrate.  If we spent the rest on educating and training our own workforce, then high paying jobs could become a reality for thousands or even millions of Americans.  Silicon Valley complains bitterly that we do not educate our citizens for the jobs they have and will have.

If you define slavery as humans being involuntarily exploited, then we are moving at warp speed to that end.  In fact, a Saudi princess just last week was arrested for overt slavery in Irvine, California.  She was placed on $ 5 Million in bail, but now it appears that there may have been 4 slaves in that household alone.  The princess confiscated their passports and required 12-hour days for 7 days each week while paying them only a pittance and not what they contracted for before coming to America.  The de facto slavery is equally onerous and yet it has become so common that we are becoming inured.  Given the relentless threat of disclosure and deportation, when men and women can only work “under the table” where they are usually paid less than minimum wage, they are afraid to complain or to notify authorities.  Strangely, the overt slave in Irvine clutched a pamphlet on worker rights that she had saved from before her travel to the US.  She had that in her hand when she met police.  She was less afraid than the typical immigrant who is forced to live in the shadows.  The conservative House of Representatives wants no part of the “liberal” senate bill.  Their only exception to any bill is to spend more money for privatizing the border security. Strangely, they also attack their hero Ronald Reagan for his “amnesty” for immigrants and they accuse the Senate of the same.

What does the current policy of keeping the status quo or reinforcing the border do?  For one, it maintains a sub minimum wage structure that is akin to black-marketing goods.  It is the black-marketing or gray-marketing labor services.  Have you noticed that the usual entry jobs in fast foods and personal services like landscaping have gone from white teens to older whites and Hispanics?  Is there a restaurant in your area that does not employ Hispanics in the kitchen? Historical protections of labor unions have been systematically removed by “right to work” laws and targeted removal by those such as the Governor of Wisconsin.  Average wages have actually fallen in the past 11 years; in states like Wisconsin, total employment has shrunk even as wages have been forced down.  Wisconsin’s economic activity is on the decline since the election of Scott Walker who has taken his economic lessons from Europe where austerity is king in a post royal era.  Europe and Wisconsin are on the decline.  Ironically, Europeans have gotten tough on immigration, and they are losing the foreign labor they depended upon.

We need to look at all the reasons for immigration and the damage that our current ad hoc cheapening of labor is doing to our economy as well as our social structures.  Farmers are unable to harvest many crops that still use hand labor unless they employ migrant workers, many of whom are undocumented.  Would documentation of working aliens be that difficult?  We could then monitor the working conditions and see that workers are paid and wages are taxed properly.  Instead of building a bigger and better wall, we could have processing centers at the border to match migration to labor needs.  We must have photo ID that identifies the worker, and states the purpose and length of the visa with simplified reporting by scanning ID.  It is feasible and cheaper than building a $46 Billion dollar wall.  Now if the purpose of immigration is to maintain a black-market labor pool to undercut the American worker and destroy unions, then our current non-system is perfect.  The House of Representatives is correct in building walls and privatizing our non-system.  What is wrong with privatizing greed anyway?  The rich will not only get richer, but they will do so faster and with legal protection to create new victims and get cheaper labor.  Maybe Lincoln did not end American slavery, after all; it has simply morphed into a new era of economic immigrants without rights.  Would you like some fries with that?

The Senate legislation deals with the estimated 11 million current undocumented immigrants unrealistically and unreasonably, but at least immigrants are recognized as existing.  That is better than the House that seems to ignore them entirely.  Thirteen years of additional hidden living for our current immigrants is excessive and subject to the whims of future bureaucrats and bigots who will trade rights for votes and onions for apples in future negotiations. Must we force immigrants to live in the shadows?  They feed us in restaurants; care for our children; harvest our crops; landscape our yards and give example for families.  Cannot this be done in three years?  Do we need three presidential elections plus a year to determine their stability here?  Most immigrants pay wage taxes now.  What will forcing fines and longer indenture prove?  They have shown their desire to be Americans by the difficulty of their passage and the sacrifices of their labor.

Peace,

George Giacoppe

17 July 2013

Big Brother on Steroids

About a year ago, I wrote a blog called “Big Brother Wants More,” describing a bill then being discussed in Congress called CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, authored by Michigan Republican Mike Rogers. What Rogers wanted CISPA to do was provide a shield from lawsuits to U.S. companies (mostly in telecommunications) that furnish information to the government about any ‘suspect’ they find. The bill passed the Republican-led House but, as far as I can tell, died in the Senate. No matter; the revelations this week from whistleblower Edward Snowden about the extent of the spying the NSA is already doing, and the amount of information routinely coming from telephone companies like Verizon and internet companies like ALL of them from Microsoft to Google to Yahoo to Facebook, pretty much makes Rogers’ bill obsolete. That’s because, according to the stories published by Glenn Greenwald in London’s Guardian, the NSA already has “backdoor” access to all overseas phone calls going through Verizon (and the others as well), and, through another program called PRISM, server access to all email, Skype, Facebook, phone and other traffic going out over the internet. The NSA and FBI, through their spokespeople and the heads of Homeland Security and Cybersecurity in the U.S., plus Congressional shills like Diane Feinstein and the aforementioned Mike Rogers, all insist that the data being collected on Americans is “legal,” and besides does not contain actual conversations or words but only “metadata.” This is simply a red herring. Big Brother doesn’t need to listen to your actual words; as long as he has the records of every call you make and every email you send, and keeps them forever—which is what the system calls for—you are permanently in the database, always available, always under suspicion. As Birgitta Jonsdottir, the radical member of Iceland’s Parliament (she has just promised to aid Edward Snowden in seeking asylum) said yesterday on KPFA, regardless of who in a foreign country the NSA targets, the program implicitly focuses on not just the calls made by the target, but the target’s calling partners, and the calling partners of those partners. In effect, this means that simply targeting one person’s calls or emails automatically makes available tens, hundreds, or thousands of others who are in touch with him and his contacts, innocently or not. As Barton Gellman of the Washington Post put it on June 6,

            Even..with no American singled out for targeting, the NSA routinely collects a great deal of American content. That is described as “incidental,” and it is inherent in contact chaining, one of the basic tools of the trade. To collect on a suspected spy or foreign terrorist means, at minimum, that everyone in the suspect’s inbox or outbox is swept in. Intelligence analysts are typically taught to chain through contacts two “hops” out from their target, which increases “incidental collection” exponentially. (emphases mine)
What we have, then, is new and now documented revelations that the NSA and the FBI and god knows what other U.S. government agencies are routinely spying on Americans and everyone else in the world, all of whom use giant American telecommunications companies.

            What we are also learning is that this has been going on for a long time—which many of us had learned earlier from writers like James Bamford, James Risen and Dana Priest—but that right after 9/11 the Congress voted to flood the spy agencies with so much money that they have had to work overtime to try to spend it. One of the ways they’ve done this, of course, is to build scores of new facilities. Another is to contract with private corporations, many of which sprang up like rotten toadstools after 9/11 to get in on the spying bonanza, to use up the money. Booz Allen Hamilton, the $5 billion corporation for whom Edward Snowden worked (as did the current head of U.S. intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr.), is one of these; the telecom companies mentioned above also feed at this same trough. But to get some idea of the scale of all this, consider what Dana Priest and William Arkin revealed in their recent series in the Washington Post, “Top Secret America.” The figures are literally mind-boggling. First, “some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.” One of the locations still being built, according to James Bamford, is a super-computer in Oak Ridge, TN that is so large it occupies an entire warehouse. It will be the fastest computer in the world—a necessity when one considers the billions upon billions of data pieces that NSA and the rest are now gathering, and which something has to try to make sense of. Second, around 854,000 people in these organizations hold top-secret security clearance, of which Edward Snowden was apparently one. Third, “in Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001.” That’s the equivalent of almost three (3) Pentagons. Fourth, many of these agencies do the same work, “creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands…track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.” Fifth, all this generates some “50,000 intelligence reports each year—a volume so large that many [reports] are routinely ignored.” Sixth, “every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work.” (all quotes from “Top Secret America.”)

            The thing about all of this spying is that most of it circumvents the most basic of our rights against “unreasonable searches and seizures” embodied in the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It may be useful to restate that centerpiece of American democracy here:

            The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This means that in order for government officials to even enter your house and look at your private possessions, they must have a Warrant—obtained from a judge—specifically stating what it is they are looking for, and giving probable cause for why they think a crime might have been, or is about to be committed. Note the specificity here: they can’t enter because they just have a “gut feeling” that you might be involved in a crime; officials, that is, can’t just enter and look over everything in hopes of finding something incriminating. They have to provide a reasonable justification for their search (reasonable enough to convince a judge) and be looking for specific evidence of a specific crime. It should go without even saying that trolling through billions of phone calls and emails and skype or facebook or twitter conversations and comments is not specific and does not offer any reasonable evidence of a crime either committed or about to be committed. And especially if your records have come up “incidentally” in connection to some chain of someone else’s calls or contacts is a reasonable or probable cause lacking. It is for this reason that Sen. Rand Paul has already stated his intention to go to the Supreme Court to challenge the random capturing of the communications of millions of American citizens in the programs recently revealed. It is unconstitutional. Period.

            As noted above, however, the shills for government spying—our so-called representatives allegedly protecting our rights—have been out in force defending the “legality” of all this spying. Feinstein, head of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, assured the public on June 6 that warrantless searches were “perfectly fine” because the information was only “meta”:

            “Our courts have consistently recognized that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in this type of metadata information and thus no search warrant is required to obtain it,” she said, adding that “any subsequent effort to obtain the content of an American’s communications would require a specific order from the FISA court.” (quoted by Jane Mayer, “What’s the Matter with Metadata,” New Yorker June 6, 2013.)
Feinstein added that 11 judges of the FISA court, meeting in secret, had authorized all this data collection and Congress had authorized it. (Concerning Edward Snowden, she called what he did “treason,” meaning she thinks his prosecution should seek the death penalty.) This would seem to suggest that Diane Feinstein, despite her position, doesn’t understand what metadata means or why it’s probably more dangerous than actual phone conversations. Susan Landau, a mathematician and Sun Microsystems engineer, pointed out why this is so in the same Jane Mayer article noted above. “It’s much more intrusive than content,” Landau said, explaining that vast amounts of information can be gleaned from studying “who you call, and who they call. If you can track that, you know exactly what is happening—you don’t need the content.” Patterns of phone calls from key business executives “can reveal impending corporate takeovers.” Phone calls to a series of physicians—a gynecologist, an oncologist, close family members—can indicate the precise nature of a personal crisis. Especially where reporters are concerned, the pattern of phone calls can reveal exactly who is giving information to whom and when, revealing all-important sources. All of this data, even without actual conversations has, according to Landau, already helped reduce the amount of time it takes U.S. Marshals to capture someone from 42 days to two days.

            When it comes to whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, and a few years ago, Bradley Manning—even now being tried for “aiding the enemy” for his release, to Wikileaks, of a treasure trove of documents and the infamous video showing U.S. helicopter pilots in Iraq murdering innocent civilians, including two Reuters reporters and a good Samaritan father and his children trying to aid one of the wounded reporters—and before that William Binney and Thomas Drake for exposing the NSA program they designed and that they knew was threatening to “create an Orwellian state,” the Obama administration has become more draconian in its response than any administration in history. The administration and its spokespeople, of course, claim they are only trying to keep the American people safe. What they are really trying to do, however, as several observers have noted, is to keep themselves and their tattered reputations and bloated institutions safe from embarrassment. That is what all the prosecutions are about, that is what all the hand-wringing is about, that is what the desperate attempts to whitewash the massive violations of American privacy are about. America is being revealed as a police state, at least, and a totalitarian one, at worst. Hopefully, the measures to intimidate whistleblowers will all be in vain, and the whole apparatus will come tumbling down. But don’t hold your breath. It’s going to take some informed opposition, some courageous opposition, and an American public that is more attentive to its vanishing rights than to the latest celebrity scandal. And it may take the demolition of the capitalist system itself—as Bamford noted when he said, ‘there could never be a Church Committee today; too much money is at stake for both the corporations involved, and the Congresspeople who get their coffers filled by these corporations.

            Meantime, let your alleged representative know what you think about this massive evisceration of fundamental American rights. Let him or her know that it is not OK with you, that you are not willing to exchange your privacy and constitutional rights for some over-hyped, supposed “war” on terror. Let him or her know that the scandalous collusion between the all-powerful state and the corporations that make billions serving (or is it stealing?) in a digital-military complex has long had a name, and it is not a kind one: fascism.

            And do everything possible to make sure that courageous whistleblowers like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are not railroaded into endless incarceration for doing what every American should be doing: pointing out that the Emperor and the Empire he manages has been stripped of even a semblance of clothes.


Lawrence DiStasi

Voting Rights: Who Needs Them?

It seems that what I noted in my last blog about the “poisons hatching out” has already begun. To wit, the latest outrage from the Supreme Fools, who voted in their usual 5 to 4 pattern to eviscerate the once universally-admired and most “American” Congressional action of the last century, the 1965 Voting Rights Act that ended the disenfranchisement of black voters. That act, pushed by Lyndon Johnson through a Congress still housing racists from the South, was paid for and stimulated by the blood of civil rights marchers in the very state of Alabama which brought the recent case to the Supreme Court. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that Section 4 of the law—the part designating which states, mostly in the old South like Alabama, and based on past discrimination (again like Alabama), needed federal “preclearance” for any changes in their voting laws—could no longer be upheld. The data on which their constraints was based, said Roberts, was “decades old;” the nation, after all, has black mayors in Mississippi and even a “black” president. Thus, the once-inhibited states would henceforth be free to establish any voting rules they chose. Texas, one of the liberated nine, immediately announced that it would go ahead with its voter ID and redistricting laws previously blocked by the Justice Department and the courts:

“With today’s decision, the state’s voter ID law will take effect immediately,” he [the Texas Attorney General] said in a statement. “Redistricting maps passed by the legislature may also take effect without approval from the federal government.” (NY Times, 6/25)
These are precisely the kinds of discriminatory changes that the Voting Rights Act was meant to forestall, for what these and other rules like gerrymandering (redistricting) do is create “safe” districts for white racists. The voter ID laws (most of which follow a pattern recommended by groups like ALEC, and which 7 of the 9 affected states have tried to pass) tend to make it far more difficult for racial minorities to prove their eligibility to vote—thus increasing the chances that Republican voters in rural areas can outvote the usual Democratic majorities largely composed of black, Latino, and women voters in the cities. This is a more subtle type of disenfranchisement than the old poll taxes, but it is disenfranchisement nonetheless. The disenfranchisement, according to Spencer Overton, law professor at George Washington University, will particularly affect local offices like city councils, school boards, and sheriffs, and thus affect “important decisions related to schools, criminal justice, health and family services, and economic opportunity that directly affect our daily lives.” (NY Times, 6/25)

            The shameful vote was shared by two Italian Americans—whose parents were subject to discrimination themselves—and by the one remaining black justice, Clarence Thomas, who sits where he does thanks to the very civil rights laws he now joins his conservative colleagues to strike down. His, like theirs, is a classic case of repudiating one’s origins. Thomas, in fact, reminds one of nothing so much as the “house negro” portrayed in Quentin Tarantino’s recent blockbuster, Django Unchained. This is not to say that I liked the movie; it’s an exploitation-of-violence film if there ever was one, and preposterous on its face. But Tarantino’s house slave Stephen (played by Samuel Jackson), portrays, if in highly exaggerated form, the devotion to the Massa over any empathy to his fellow slaves that Malcolm X long ago excoriated. Stephen gets his comeuppance in the end, of course, this being Hollywood, but we are not likely to see Justice Thomas getting his any time soon. Too bad. He deserves, like Stephen in the movie, to be kneecapped for his betrayal of his own people. The same goes for Scalia and Alito. They shamefully betray the pain endured by Italian immigrants like their parents (who were in fact racialized by the white America they entered a century ago) by inflicting it upon those who suffer a like pain in our time. Scalia, in fact, said that the renewable of the Voting Rights Act would be a “perpetuation of racial entitlement”—as if the Africans who were brought to this country in chains, and who still suffer outlandish racial profiling and discrimination and economic slavery, are somehow taking advantage of their oppressed state. Amazing that someone with such intelligence could be so blind to his own prejudice, so ignorant of his own people’s history, so unaware of his own sick need to identify with his oppressors.

            The NAACP and other groups are calling, expectedly, for Congress to write new updated rules to maintain the protections lost under Section 4. But most Congress-watchers consider it very unlikely that the current divided Congress could possibly agree on such rules. As Senator Charles Schumer of New York said, “As long as Republicans have a majority in the House and Democrats don’t have 60 votes in the Senate, there will be no preclearance.”

            Indeed. And as long as the current racists hold a majority on the Supreme Court, we can expect similar outrages. The hits will keep coming, the racists will keep being appointed (remember John Roberts at his confirmation hearing, talking about being a “non-activist” and impartial judge who would simply “call balls and strikes”?), the oppression and inequality will get worse, the poisons will keep hatching out. All that remains to be seen is whether the benighted public has a breaking point, or whether it will, as is its wont, simply bow its head and keep hoping the axe will get dull on others before it makes its fatal cut.



Lawrence DiStasi

Mornings on Horseback: a Review

Mornings on Horseback

A Biography

David McCullough

Simon and Schuster:  445 pp., $16, paperback

We know not the rich or famous

But if we did, they’d blame us

For their failings and their downs

And credit selves for all their crowns

Though we may never prove it’s true

Their circles don’t include our friends

Or those within our working crew

We are not of means, but ends

While they must find some work to do

This biography of Theodore Roosevelt is not a garden-variety glorification of a famous man, but the detailed insight of a family destined for greatness in the face of extremes.  The extremes include wealth and power, but also extreme of insulation from deprivation and carefully choreographed social contact with only the top rung of the social ladder.

Much of the book is drawn from the literally thousands of letters written to and by the Roosevelts and the detail is both exquisite and, at times, excruciating.  McCullough has painstakingly researched the background of Teddy Roosevelt and has spent much of the book uncovering the fascinating roots of his father, also Teddy Roosevelt.  McCullough has not taken the path of other biographers of Roosevelt, but instead carved this full-bodied description from wood of his own choosing.  His choices include the strengths and weaknesses of reality and the resulting sculpture is a worthy piece.

Some of the early days of the Teddy we thought we knew are wrapped tightly in the body of his family and especially his father who, although already wealthy through family, gains more through his knowledge of the upper social class in 19^th Century America.  Teddy Senior had manifold resources of money and position and he used it to protect and educate his family and not merely his children.  He was wealthy enough to buy his way out of the Civil War as many of his station did and yet writes of wishing he had served.  That may remind you of a recent candidate for president who spoke wistfully for his support of the Vietnam War while he got three deferments to avoid it.  Like Governor Romney, Roosevelt was kept apart from those who served, but hired them and fired them.  The public school system was not for people of his stature; not even private schools would do, but Roosevelt hired tutors who educated and traveled with the family.  In fact, the social fiber of his life was so strong that he was able to travel in Europe for a year meeting up from time to time with his peers and their families.  He even had a winter on the Nile and chartered a ship for his entourage while underwriting the ships of eight of his peers and their families and their many servants and staff so they could meet socially from time to time on the river.  McCullough describes a chilling scene in Italy where the senior Theodore Roosevelt happens upon a group of starving women and children.  The Roosevelts purchase cake and break it into crumbs to feed to the hapless Italians and absolutely chortle and delight in watching them grovel on their hands and knees feeding on the cake “like chickens.”  It is a stark reminder that having wealth and social position is no guarantee of grace or humanity.

There are still other episodes that demonstrate that even in the late 19^th Century, that wealth was no guarantee of health.  The elder Theodore died painfully with stomach cancer and was given ether to reduce the pain.  His wife Mittie (the younger Theodore’s mother) died from typhoid fever due to poor hygiene whether from their own practices or their cooks is unknown.  Within eleven hours, Alice, young Theodore’s wife died of Bright’s disease after he rushed back from his political position in Albany. Bright’s disease was a general term for kidney failure at the time.  Through most of the youth of the younger Teddy, he suffered from asthma and was given special attention so that the family might get through the many episodes.  David McCullough did the research to determine that virtually all his attacks began on Friday nights thus supporting the thesis that young Roosevelt was psychosomatic and yet the family and especially his father cared for him for hours on end and self prescribed “cures” such as cigars to ease the attacks.  The family also endured countless outdoor challenges to get the young Theodore to fresh air.

Having lost his wife and mother, the younger Teddy was drawn more fully into his political work.  He depended increasingly on his sister Anna, “Bamie” within the family.  His only child was raised by Anna.  In his early days, even in the New York legislature, Teddy was seen as a dandy who dressed impeccably, but had a weak voice, a prissy appearance and was ineffective in dealing with ordinary people.  A few, however, noted his ability to analyze and to present cogent arguments despite his appearance.  They saw him build into a leader that others did not see at the time.

It is unclear that his self analysis or perhaps simply a feeling that he needed to become more physically capable led to his intense training and travel to the Badlands of the Dakotas, but this where we first see the Teddy that became famous for his physical exploits and toughness.  All this was despite his “dude” fashion.  He gained weight in muscle and gained physical endurance.  In essence, he became what he first attempted to portray in posed photographs.  He invested in cattle and became a “ranchman” rather than a cowboy and yet he worked as hard and long as any of the help.  There is an interesting tidbit from his days in the field when one of his hired hands offered Teddy a stray calf he had roped.  Roosevelt fired him on the spot saying that anybody that would steal for him would soon steal from him.  Overall, he lost money on cattle, but learned and grew tremendously in a period of about three years.  He also reprimanded and nearly fired a cowboy who had the temerity to call him “Theodore.”  Social position outranked money in the eyes of Roosevelt.  While in the Dakota Badlands, he became a social and business associate of Marquis de Mores of France who also invested in the cattle business and built a slaughterhouse in the Badlands to change the practice of shipping cattle to Chicago for slaughter.  Social standing seemed to outweigh all other factors in business as well as social decisions.  In that regard, the elder and younger Theodore were alike.  Even his associations while at Harvard were not with the wealthy, but only the well positioned wealthy of the lot.

McCullough spends little ink on what other authors dwell upon in Roosevelt’s prime national political life.  That is available nearly everywhere, but if you want a detailed view of how the phenomenon of Teddy Roosevelt was formed and matured, you will find this a valuable study of the times and persons that surrounded Teddy Roosevelt.  If you want to know more intimate details of his family life, his upbringing and social status, then this book is essential.

Peace,

George Giacoppe

30 June 2013

The Politics of Scandals

Greed, corruption and abuse of power are older than recorded history. Looking back on political scandals in American history we might conclude that as government has grown the tools of modern technology are becoming better at uncovering and reporting misconduct, or at least accusations of it.

George Washington’s administration was virtually scandal free and very few scandals marred our early history. Andrew Jackson’s relocation of the Cherokee Indians to Oklahoma, like the Japanese internment in World War II should have been a scandal but wasn’t. It was not until U.S. Grant’s administration that scandals became common, but they didn’t prevent his re-election.

What has changed in this modern age of mass media, focus groups and think tanks is how scandals are managed by the political parties to maximize their impact and minimize their damage. Democrats and Republicans view this quite differently. Fox News and MSNBC certainly view them differently. The networks and CNN usually go out of their way to be neutral and not offend either party as being systemically guilty.

For literally generations Republicans used the Ted Kennedy incident at Chappaquiddick as a major fund raising tool. Naturally both parties want to look better than the other side. However, the facts surrounding political scandals over the past fifty years seem to show that investigations of misconduct were pursued in very different ways for different purposes.

Let’s start with Spiro Agnew, hardly a household name anymore, who pleaded no contest to bribery charges and quietly disappeared from view. That was followed by the massive publicly televised Watergate hearings that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, who was then conveniently pardoned by his hand selected Vice-president Gerald Ford. Then Ronald Reagan was elected and the Iranians released the embassy hostages in an October surprise that he probably didn’t need to win. The next major scandal was the much publicized Iran Contra affair that brought Oliver North into prominence. Reagan himself seemed hardly touched by the fact that his administration was covertly funding a secret war by trading arms for cash to Iran. The public seemed to accept that Reagan simply never knew about it because no one told him.

When Bill Clinton took office the economy was surging under an economic plan every Republican voted against. These were desperate times for Republicans since the public was less than thrilled with Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America. What to do? They needed a scandal and called it Whitewater. With Ken Starr conducting an endless fishing expedition over an obscure Savings and Loan that the Clinton’s had invested in and lost money. Whitewater distracted from how well things were going. People thought they wouldn’t just keep investigating if there wasn’t something there would they? For good measure they tossed in Travelgate, Filegate and a host of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about the death of Clinton’s friend Vince Foster. Since Watergate was a big deal, putting gate at the end made it sound like a scandal even if it wasn‘t.

As we all recall Starr and the Republicans finally hit scandal pay dirt with the Monica Lewinski affair about sex, or something like it, in the public’s very own Oval Office. The GOP didn’t need a plan to end poverty or fix immigration since they could push this lurid scandal all the way to impeachment. This would bolster their credentials as the “Party of Family Values,” even if impeachment failed.

For many Republicans scandals are a political tool. When the youthful indiscretions of Henry Hyde broke up a marriage, or when Newt Gingrich dumped his wife while she had cancer it wasn’t a serious scandal. Gingrich was even accepted as a major presidential candidate after he asked God for forgiveness. The list of those champions of family values include John Ensign and Bob Ney who resigned and Duke Cunningham and Jack Abramoff who when to jail. When Democrats such as John Edwards, Elliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner are involved in scandals Democrats tend to judge them harshly.

When Obama became President and Democrats had majorities in the House and Senate many liberals thought there should have been hearings about torture and wiretapping. The Democrats decided they needed to get the country moving again and didn’t want investigations to be their focus. Not only did the guilty get a pass the Republicans blocked everything they could by filibuster The Republican have tried to keep Benghazi and the IRS action about the Tea Party front and center as long as possible to distract from the lack of progress. Scandals have reached the stage where they are often a tactic reflecting a political view instead of a means to address justice.

David Silva

Let All the Poisons Hatch Out

            I’ve been mulling over this sentiment a lot lately. It comes from a line in the PBS adaptation of Robert Graves’ classic “I, Claudius,” when Claudius as emperor voices his intention to allow all of the accumulated evil fostered by the Roman Empire, and his own demented family in particular, play itself out in an orgy of wicked indulgence. Having seen who preceded him—Tiberius and Caligula—and what is about to follow him with Nero, we the audience understand what Claudius means. Imperial Rome shortly after the first emperor, Augustus, gave himself the title, has become a cesspool of murder, bestiality and perversion. The thoughtful Claudius presumably hopes that once Nero inflicts his apocalyptic evil upon Rome, Romans will be so fed up with emperors that they will bring back the republic. Of course, it doesn’t happen, but that’s another matter—or perhaps it isn’t. Because in a way, that’s what I once thought regarding our own Nero, Little Georgie Bush, and have been thinking again regarding our still-thriving, if slightly tottering American empire. Like the out-of-control Roman Empire, our once-democratic republic, no matter who is nominally in charge, has become a cesspool of inequality, money-grubbing, government spying, influence-peddling, war-mongering, extra-judicial murder by drone, poisonous despoliation of land, air and water, and the infliction of our mountains of toxic waste upon it all. Only this time, not just America but the whole world is involved, the whole world seems bent on following our example, and the whole world, the entire planet, is at risk from exploitation, increasing species die-offs, and of course, global warming due to CO2 pollution from the burning of fossil fuels. While most people, including myself, who write about this usually feel obliged to present a variety of possible solutions to the problem—increasingly desperate ways to moderate capitalism or evolve steady-state solutions to production, or impose limits on population growth and carbon burning—my inclination at times of late has been to say, ‘why not emulate old Claudius?’ Let all the poisons lurking in the mud hatch out, let the corporations and bankers and corrupt politicians and idiot fundamentalists continue their vicious ways, let the population expand to 9 or 10 billion with its attendant poverty, let the pollution and greenhouse gases overrun the planet and melt the icecaps and flood the oceans—until global warming puts an end to that most indomitable and destructive of all pests, homo sapiens.

            In this I am following not only the Emperor Claudius, but also Herman Melville’s most memorable character, Bartleby the Scrivener. You remember Bartleby. So disillusioned had he become with his lot in the Wall Street firm where he’d recently been hired as a copyist, that he one day refused to do a proofreading job the boss/narrator asked him to do; and then increasingly refused to do anything at all. He simply stared at the wall of his office, and repeated his phrase: “I prefer not to.” Soon the narrator discovers that Bartleby’s refusal has extended even to his living place: he has taken up living in the office, and refuses to move to a more comfortable spot when it is offered. Even when the narrator moves his business out of his office in a last attempt to bring Bartleby to understand the consequences of his actions, it has no effect: Bartleby continues his absolute refusal. New tenant or no, Bartleby simply stays in the building, sleeping on the stairs when he is ejected from the office, until he is finally removed by the law and placed in the Tombs, New York city’s jail. By now thoroughly absorbed in his one-time employee’s strange fate, the narrator visits him in jail, but no matter what forms of comfort or salvation he offers, Bartleby’s response is always the same. I prefer not to. This inimitable phrase is as brilliant in its brevity as it is unflinching in its finality. Don’t ask me to demonstrate human sociability or common sense or determination to save myself and thrive or even survive. I prefer not to. Nor does Bartleby ever really explain what has driven him to this pass, what has eventually driven him to refuse even minimal nourishment to keep himself alive. We and the narrator simply understand—especially when we learn at the end that Bartleby had once worked in the dead letter office of the U.S. Postal Service—that Bartleby has concluded that life simply wasn’t worth the struggle. Or perhaps that his fellow Americans weren’t worth emulating or even associating or communicating with. That life as it was practiced in success-at-all-costs America was simply a dead letter.

            This gets to some of my recent feelings. The other night I saw a documentary on the collapse of Detroit called Detropia, and it only confirmed the sense that the civilization we once thought we had here in America—the last, best hope of mankind—is fading fast. Whole areas of the once-thriving Motor City were burned out and boarded up, while others were denuded of homes and skeletal factories and life itself and were overgrowing with weeds and vacant lots. The population had plummeted to less than half of its 1.8 million people, reaching below 700,000 recently. People, mostly black people, were lost, both disgusted and terrified of what lay ahead for them, the workers that a once-proud and prosperous corporate America had abandoned. As I watched, I too became increasingly disgusted by the system that had brought Detroit and all of us to this pass (the last time I was in my once-thriving industrial hometown, Bridgeport, CT, I saw the same type of wasteland in progress, with homes in once-lovely neighborhoods boarded up, and once-bustling factories rotting in the weeds). And my disgust grew with the larger thought of what humans do to each other in the name of getting-ahead, of profit, not just in Detroit, which may be only the canary in the coalmine, but everywhere. Because according to recent UNICEF statistics, nearly half the world's population lives on less than $2.00 a day, a billion children live in soul-destroying poverty, and 22,000 of them die each day because of it. Moreover, the upwards of a billion people who lack access to adequate drinking water (this can only get worse with glaciers melting and groundwater being polluted by industrial chemicals), and who go hungry every day, could be lifted out of hunger several times over by the incomes of only 100 of the richest people who are their companions on this planet. So it is not so much that I am disgusted with my fellow human beings, though I am, and therefore wouldn’t mind taking my leave of them. It is also that I am disgusted with the apparently unstoppable human impulse towards a greed so pervasive that it is leading to planetary suicide. I am disgusted with the apparent death wish of our corporate capitalist civilization that simply cannot or will not open its eyes to see beyond the latest stock prices. I am disgusted with the priorities that place the wealth of a few corporations and their leaders over the well-being of billions of ordinary, mostly starving people. And with the insistence of those billions of starving, enslaved people to keep reproducing themselves and trudging on, bearing up beyond all reason, beyond all hope, beyond the carrying capacity of the planet.

This drive to persevere and reproduce in the face of planetary misery and incapacity doesn’t endanger only other human beings, either. It endangers all other beings on the planet as well, lesser (in our view) beings like animals and fish and fowl and insects whom we have busied ourselves for several hundred years pushing beyond the limit of their range and extincting as if we, we humans, were the only beings on the planet. As if we, we humans, were the only beings who matttered. It is at the core of our sickness, this notion that only humans deserve to live, and then only human beings, like ourselves, of the “right sort,” or the right color, or the right belief system or city or nation, and that the only place for all other beings is in unlivable ghettos or marginal islands or zoos or “nature preserves” that we set up for them to live a truncated and impoverished and unbearable existence. It is the height of pride and arrogance—one that we always pretend to eschew but really don’t—and it deserves the comeuppance that is surely coming. Though part of my renunciation, my willingness to ‘let all the poisons hatch out,’ would be to have nothing to do with that comeuppance. All I would be agreeing to do is to express my intention to accept its playing out and eventual, natural consummation. People are determined to survive and reproduce and hope and invent always inadequate because selfish solutions, so who am I to advise them to stop? Let them. Carry on brave humans. Carry on. Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.

            Of course, some might ask if it doesn’t grieve me that the poisons that emerge will be painful to billions of innocents, my own kin included. My answer is that it surely does. But there seems no help for it. Not to mention the fact that pain for billions is an ineluctable part of our current system; that pain inflicted on others, particularly dark others or remote others, seems not to prick the conscience of most humans—and in particular not the conscience of those in power—one bit. It is a major portion of what humans do, and enjoy doing: inflicting pain and domination and exploitation on helpless others. And not accidentally, either; with full intention and malice aforethought (an email in Jeff Madrick’s Age of Greed on how Wall Streeters see their own business strategy said it well: “Lure the people into the calm and then totally fuck ‘em.”) Always, of course, finding sophisticated justification for it in “natural laws” and the privileges and duties of those chosen to dominate over lesser beings, those so gifted they need no other beings.

And so, what other response will do, other than to accept it, let natural processes (many of which we have hopelessly compromised) hatch out, and observe, for as long as one is alive to observe, what happens. And grieve for it.

This is not, by the way, to say that I think the planet itself is in danger. Nor do I think that most life on the planet is in danger of expiring along with us. No. The planet will adapt, the planet will survive. Life will survive and blot out all trace of us (see Alan Weisman’s 2007 best seller, The World Without Us), perhaps to even generate a new species to replace us—though I hope not for several million years. The planet, after all, needs a rest. Especially from us. A rest from our plunder. A rest from our domination. A rest from our sick cleverness and arrogance and ignorance. The only thing that might be useful for us to leave behind is some sort of easily accessed record that a new species might be able to learn from. Though perhaps that will be easy enough for future archeologists to find even without our help—we will have left such an indigestible mess behind. No matter. Any new species, if it turned out to be anything like us, probably wouldn’t pay attention in any case. ‘Ah, those stupid homo sapiens,’ they might conclude; ‘how fortunate that we’re not like them. How fortunate that we have evolved differently. How fortunate that we understand that exploitation must be done with care, and balance, and the right amount of attention to those one dominates, and a proper provision for waste disposal. How fortunate we are to be so superior.’

Ah yes. And it will all begin again. In the awful contemplation of which, how could one not prefer the Bartleby option? How could one not ‘prefer not to?’

Although it must also be admitted that, given the grimly repressive nature of the so-called civilization we have spawned, and the urgent need of those in power to maintain the illusion that they care for each and every one of those in their charge, that they care for “life” and the precious sanctity of each embryo, given all that, even the Bartleby option may no longer be allowed. I mean, look at the poor bastards in Guantanamo who have resorted to a hunger strike. Can Big Brother allow them to do that? Can they be allowed to have control even over their own willingness or unwillingness to take in nourishment, to live or not live? Not on your life. Our noble caretakers, so concerned for the law and procedure and the “right” and “proper” way to end a life, insist on keeping such prisoners alive by force-feeding (as they do in hospitals), even if such force-feeding amounts to torture. And it does. Even if the end state of such force-feeding is a living death. And it is. But after all, isn’t torture unto living death preferable to dead death? Isn’t the living death of endless imprisonment or enslavement preferable to dead death? Isn’t concerned coercion unto living death preferable to the terrible publicity, the terrible example for the children, the terrible danger of despair, the terrible exposure of the entire system that “preferring not to” would result in?

Think about it, for I believe it’s something a whole lot of us may well have to decide—and soon.



Lawrence DiStasi