Jackson still has no water

Jackson, Mississippi is entering its third day without water. The city's water supply system has been failing for years, but the flooding Pearl River simply overwhelmed it. Jackson may be the capital of Mississippi, but white flight has made it a 79% Black city and the white supremacist legislature just doesn't give a shit about the people they pass every day commuting from elsewhere to their meetings in the capitol. Mayor Lumumba told them two years ago that the water system needed $40 million to make it functional. They allocated $3 million. By comparison, I managed a larger annual budget when I was principal of a 400-student high school. 

I started seeing the usual complaints yesterday, blaming this on the imagined generosity the US shows the world in contrast with its own people: so many billions for Ukraine, so many billions for Israel, so many billions for Taiwan, "Boil your water" for Mississippi. But what this view always obscures is the fact that our generosity abroad always encompasses weapons. It's not a gift to others; it's a gift to McDonnell-Douglass, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon, and the other profiteers of death in the half-trillion dollar a year US arms industry. We say that greedy people are thirsty. These death merchants are thirsty for blood. Desperate after the end of US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they celebrate the horrors in Ukraine.

What is $40 million to upgrade Jackson's water system? The troubled F-35 fighter jet program looks to cost $1.7 trillion.  A single carrier-based F-35 is estimated to cost $337 million. We could fix almost nine Jacksons for the price of one fighter plane. And - again - don't be fooled into thinking this is about our defense. The F-35 program is corporate welfare. 

People like to pretend that WIC and housing subsidies support the people who receive them. In reality they allow employers to pay less than a living wage. So-called "welfare" is actually putting money into the treasuries of the corporations who underpay their workers. But they are happy to have you angry with those workers, even when you're one of them yourself.

In the same way, the big arms manufacturers are happy to have you believe that they are protecting you. They're happy to let you thing that we're supporting the lifestyles of people in other countries who are getting their weapons. You can blame anybody as long as their profits keep rolling in.

None of this helps the people of Jackson. I considered tweeting this morning that it is too bad for the people of Jackson that they need a new water system instead of an F-35. But what they really don't need is my snark. They need drinking water. And they need a representative state government to meet in their own city.