Tropical Storm Sara

 Tropical Storm Sara didn't get much attention in the United States. It was a weather story, with headlines like "Storm Weakens," and illustrations like satellite photos of its extent. The 110,000 Hondurans cut off from roads by flooding weren't mentioned or pictured. I suppose if any homeless Hondurans feel compelled to flee north we will hear all about them, transformed on FOX News from climate refugees into an invading army.

And make no mistake. This isn't a weather story, it is a climate story. In September, we heard all about the horror of Hurricane Helene. In part that was because it was a stronger storm. In larger part that was because it hurt white Americans. Scientists who study such things are clear that climate change made Helene more damaging than it would have been without a 2°+ increase(!) in ocean temperature. Our storms have become both stronger and more frequent.

But there has been a profound disconnect between our concern for the victims of these storms (at least the victims in the US) and our concern about the climate crisis. President-elect Trump says the climate crisis is a "scam" and is promising more drilling for fossil fuels. His appointee for Energy Secretary calls the climate crisis a "hoax" and says that fossil fuels will restore American dominance. He also promises to uplift women in the former colonial world by "giving" them natural gas so they won't have to walk all day in search of firewood.

I won't say too much about the incoming secretary of the interior, because as governor of the North Dakota petrostate he gave lip service to the climate crisis as an actual phenomenon, promising to make the state carbon neutral. We'll see. He has actual experience as a public servant so he may not fall into the category of woefully under qualified clowns whose recommendations for high office are their personal loyalty to DJT and their incompetence. Perhaps he belongs in the other category of Trump appointees: ambitious, serious, and doomed to be fired soon.

The UN's climate summit is meeting in Baku right now. Azerbaijan is another petrostate. It has been polluting the Caspian Sea since its land-based oilfields dried up and the industry shifted to offshore wells, which makes it a strange choice. On the other hand, the UN has been holding these meetings for thirty years without making any impact on the problem, so...

I have been trying since the election to focus on positive signs of actual resistance (as opposed to Democratic Party pretense.) I have been trying to discourage the divisive finger-pointing that can make it impossible for us to raise any united front against fascism and racial capitalism. But this morning all I can see is a system that is determined to murder us all, led by enthusiastic profiteers who somehow imagine that they will be immune to the destruction.

I am hopeful that putting this dread into words will enable me to move on and return to planning our answer.

Okay. Here's a postmortem.

 I have been avoiding the election postmortems. I don't think the handwringing and the fingerpointing are going to help us organize against racist and fascist atrocity. 

I keep seeing white pundits (and grass-roots white liberals, too) who are just astonished that Black and Latino voters "shifted" to Trump, as if our own white relatives and neighbors didn't cast enough ballots already to win victory for xenophophia, misogyny, white supremacy, homophobia, and an end to the Constitution. They really seem to be believe that the Society of Magical Negroes has an obligation to save us white people from the logic of our own privilege.

I also keep seeing Latino friends yelling at other Latinos that when the white supremacist mob says "Illegal!" they're not talking about immigration status; they mean every person of Latin American origin. I see Black friends yelling at other Black people that DJT's racism doesn't stop at Brown people. And - of course - I see Black friends who are endlessly enraged at Boricuas and Dominicanos who truly believe that they are white... and voted that way.

I have written publicly that I don't think dwelling on any of this is helpful. But I will take a few moments for a closer look by examining one particular Election District here in the Bronx. It's just a few blocks where a lot of my close friends live. I have spent a lot of time in their homes. I have attended a lot of parties in the basements of their buildings, celebrating milestones in their lives and the lives of their children.

This Election District coincides closely with a census tract, so I can look at demographic as well as voting data. 68% of the people are what the US Census calls "Hispanic." I'll say, based on my observation that they're mostly Dominican and Puerto Rico. The Census says 24% of the people are Black. Only 1% of the people in this tract are white.

It's a comparatively poor district, too, although I don't know anybody there who admits to being poor. 36% are listed by the Census as below the poverty line, which is more than twice the New York City average. I will add, for the benefit of those who haven't studied this question: most economists agree that people earning double the official "poverty line" are still poor. That means that the Census Bureau's poverty numbers are dramatically understated. And that is nation wide. New York City is more expensive than most places. 26% of the children in the district live in Census-defined "poverty." So do half of the seniors over 65.

So how do these people vote?

The official tallies for the 2020 election show that 93% of the people in this small Election District voted for Biden and 7% for Trump. Those are truly astonishing numbers, overwhelming, in fact. And they conform rather closely with previous elections. So it is definitely noteworthy that the (still unofficial) tallies for this week show a shift: On Tuesday, Kamala Harris received 74% of the vote in these blocks, while DJT got 26%. That is a 19-percentage point shift, and that is a lot.

Harris still won an overwhelming majority in the district, in the borough, and in the city. But it means that an awful lot of people on those streets and in those buildings are looking around wide-eyed at their neighbors and asking, "What the fuck are you thinking? How could you possibly vote for a man who says - loudly and daily - that he hates us? When he says he has day-one plans to deport you and me, do you think he's talking about someone else?"

I'll say these things: 

• Even DJT himself doesn't seem to understand how tariffs work so it's a little hard for me to get angry at people who never had a college economics course and believe what he says about that.
• Male supremacy and its corollary - rape culture - haven't really gone away. That didn't just make it hard for lots of men (and women, too!) to vote for Kamala Harris. It also made it easier for them to look at a weak, blustering, misogynist and see him as the imaginary tough guy he thinks he is.
• We saw in his first campaign that a lie, repeated often enough, establishes itself as a kind of alternate truth. And his lies never let up: about the economy, about immigrant "armies" seizing towns and eating pets, about emergency hurricane relief... do I need to go on?
• I will add that white-supremacist thinking is a drug, along with great nation chauvinism. White people aren't the only ones who are susceptible. How often have I noted that the first thing new immigrants to this country want to do is close the door behind them?

These things are all true. But as I said at the outset, they should not distract us too much. We should certainly not let them divide us. In this one little microcosm I have been looking at, DJT only fooled one-quarter of the people. The other three quarters were unmoved by his bullshit. That is no small thing. If we are going to beat back fascism we have to begin by uniting with the people around us who see the truth. We ourselves would be fools to reject unity because someone in their family or someone of their ethnicity fell for DJT's propaganda. And beating back fascism is only a start. If we hope to defeat racial capitalism itself, we're going to have to win over those people who did fall for the lies. Berating them today as weak-minded and treasonous may satisfy our anger and disappointment, but I don't see how it helps us in the long run. Laughing at them when they themselves get deported may feel like justice, but I don't see how it helps us convince them to join us.

We are related

 We have all been trained to use the phrase “the Economy” without a great deal of thought, often capitalized as if it were a person… or perhaps a god. During this election cycle it has been shorthand for prices.

Sharp observers have noted that price gouging - not inflation - has been responsible for much of the increase in prices at supermarkets, at gas pumps, and in housing. And it is worth noting that price gouging has been very helpful to some indicators of “the economy,” among them the stock market.

But “the economy” is an abstraction for certain kinds of human relationships: 

The economy is the relationship between you and the Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Indians, and Nepalis who work for Classic Fashion in the Kingdom of Jordan making your Calvin Kleins, your Reeboks and Adidas, your Haynes and Under Armour.

The economy is the relationship between you and the farmworkers in Michoacan who grow and harvest the strawberries you eat in the winter.

The economy is the relationship between you and the Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Africans who slaughter, butcher, and pack the beef and pork you eat.

It is also the relationship between you and the Mayan eight-year old selling candy on the subway because a European bank flooded her family’s farm and home to build an unnecessary hydroelectric dam so it could market carbon credits.

It is also the relationship between you and the Venezuelan accountant who delivered your Uber Eats on a rented scooter because the United States is starving his family in Caracas as a punishment for voting for Hugo Chavez in 1998.

And it is the relationship between you and the Haitian home health care aide who is here taking care of your grandpa because Haiti has been impoverished by repeated invasions from the United States, largely as a punishment for being a Black country that freed itself from slavery and colonialism. 

None of us know more than a handful of these people personally. In 1840 the essayist Thomas Carlyle said that all our relationships were being reduced to an impersonal cash nexus, meaning that “the Economy” strips our relationships of all their human dimensions but one. In that respect you could say that it is a kind of pornography, eliminating any conversation, care, or affection. 

Some will argue that we have gained from being in economic relationship with so many people around the world, and that we cannot possibly know all of them. The argument is that our lives would be impoverished if we could only trade for food and clothing and services with people in our immediate area and our immediate circle. We certainly couldn’t have strawberries in the winter. We certainly would own fewer clothes. What we have definitely lost is kinship.

The erasure of kinship was an essential feature of early capitalist development. And I don’t just mean our loss of human ties with our neighbors. Turning human beings into commodities couldn’t be done without denying Black moms' kinship with their own children. Black children could only become transferable commodities - available for sale or as security for loans - if capitalist custom and law denied their kinship with their moms. And not only moms, but dads, too, - even white dads - were denied kinship with their own children. Racial capitalism was so committed to turning Black people into magically-profitable investments that the children of  Black women (including the children of Black women and white men) were also permanently enslaved, often the transferable property of their own fathers. Saidiya Hartman has said of this commodification of children that the woman’s birth canal was turned into another Middle Passage. I do not know any stronger example of how the capitalist economy works to dehumanize us and to erase our kinship with one another. 

This week it has been about Puerto Ricans. And why do the heralds of racial capitalism have a particular hatred for Puerto Ricans? 

It is precisely because they are US citizens and cannot be marginalized and disfranchised by immigration law. 

Understand: capitalism doesn’t want to bar Haitians, or Dominicans, or Salvadorans, or Guatemalans. Capitalism relies on them and on their labor.

Capitalism doesn’t hate undocumented immigrants because they are here without papers. Racial capitalism loves workers with no rights. Racial capitalism cannot function without such workers. It doesn’t matter whether they are here in the United States working in agriculture and food processing or they are overseas producing our clothing. 

And if you have been feeling economically diminished, well, that is the way capitalism works. It dehumanizes some “other,” often with your enthusiastic cooperation and approval, and then it does the same to you.

I am blessed beyond measure by the surprising number of you who have adopted me as a brother, as a father, as a grandfather. It humbles me. Our kinship enriches my life.

I just ask that you also consider our kinship with that eight-year old selling candy on the subway. I ask that you remember our kinship with that Venezuelan accountant delivering your takeout. I ask that you honor our kinship with the Haitian lady caring for your grandpa.

We are related.

What is monopoly capitalism"?

Monopoly capitalism monopolizes all wealth. 

It bogarts the air, the land, and the water. 

It bogarts our labor and the things we produce. 

It bogarts our food. 

It bogarts our creativity.

Monopoly capital steals from us. 

It steals our kinship and turns us against one another. 

It even steals our kinship with the Earth that nourishes us.

Monopoly capitalism is a parasite that is killing its host.

על חטא

For the sin we have sinned before you by murdering our neighbors
   And for the sin we have sinned before you by applauding those murders
For the sin we have sinned before you by bombing their homes
   And for the sin we have sinned before you by denying them food
For the sin we have sinned before you by denying that these are sins
   And for the sin we have sinned before you by blaming the victims themselves
For the sin we have sinned before you by stealing their land
   And for the sin we have sinned before you by insisting that it is ours
For the sin we have sinned before you by saying that these crimes are your will
   And for the sin we have sinned before you by saying they are essential to our survival
For the sin we have sinned before you by worshipping weapons 
   And for the sin we have sinned before you by worshipping our own victimhood
For the sin we have sinned before you by denying the humanity of our neighbors
   And for the sin we have sinned before you by abandoning our own humanity
For the sin we have sinned before you by rejecting your law
   And for the sin we have sinned before you by pretending to observe your law
For the sin we have sinned before you by asking forgiveness without ever repenting
   And for the sin we have sinned before you by asking forgiveness while continuing our crimes
For the sin we have sinned before you by our false confessions
   And for the sin we have sinned before you by failure to make reparation

“When you lift up your hands I will withhold mercy from you
Though your pray at length I will not listen
Because your hands are covered in blood.” Isaiah 1:15

Orange Shirt Day and the Blameless American

Today is Truth and Reconciliation Day, a Canadian national holiday meant as a memorial to the atrocities of Indian residential schools and to the continuing, intergenerational trauma they inflicted. It’s not my place to comment on whether the truth has fully come to light, or whether there has actually been any reconciliation. 

I will say that when South Africa established its Truth and Reconciliation Commission to deal with the crimes of the apartheid era, individuals were only eligible for amnesty from the criminal justice system if they made a full disclosure of their own personal crimes. I will quote the head of that Commission, Bishop Desmond Tutu, who wrote in 1999 that unless the economics of apartheid are resolved - the poor housing, lack of clean water and electricity, second-class schools and health care - “we can just as well kiss reconciliation good bye.” 

But I will also note that the United States continually refuses even to pretend… with either truth or reconciliation. How many states have made it illegal to teach schoolchildren the history of racism in this country? How many have made it illegal to discuss gender? 

In 2008, the House of Representatives issued a formal “apology” to African Americans for both slavery and Jim Crow, but its substance was limited to claiming a “commitment to rectify the lingering consequences of the misdeeds committed against African Americans under slavery and Jim Crow.” And that was the end of that. No particulars. No attempt at reparation. This looks a lot like “forgive and forget,” ie, impunity. 

Hidden in the 2010 Defense Appropriation Act was another “apology,” this one to Native Americans for “violence, maltreatment, and neglect.” Congress committed itself “to move toward a brighter future where all the people of this land live reconciled as brothers and sisters.” But the many lawyers in the House and Senate made certain to include this language: “Nothing in this section authorizes or supports any claim against the United States.” Nor, again, was there any discussion of what reconciliation might actually look like. It reads to me like, “We said ’Sorry.’ What more do you want?” 

And the only nation on Earth that has ever used nuclear weapons against people - the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - continues to refuse an apology. In 1994, the National Museum of Air and Space at the Smithsonian planned a balanced exhibit for the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing. Despite multiple revisions intended to accommodate the people who thought the exhibit too pro-Japanese, the museum eventually cancelled it. In the end they just displayed the airplane that dropped the bomb: without interpretation, without images of the destruction, without melted artifacts of the bombing. 

So I will just avoid being overly critical of Canada. 

Because I am a blameless American.

Settler Colonialism 2

In my last post I made reference to the verbal gymnastics of the Supreme Court in justifying the seizure of Indigenous territories by the United States. And I linked to some things I wrote about an early case, Fletcher v. Peck, 10 U.S. 87 (1810) in a previous post, from January. But that earlier post had a slightly different focus, so I want to revisit that Court decision here. It is an example of what I mean when I say that the Declaration of Independence was, among other things, a license for private land speculators to use the US Army to back them up when they were selling Native land that they decided was theirs to sell: to steal cultivated farms, houses, and community buildings from Native people; to force them, at gunpoint, to move hundreds of miles to land occupied by other Native people - land to which the white speculators also had no right. It is what I mean when I say that the US Army fought against Indigenous peoples for over a hundred years after the American Revolution to get actual (and not just pretended) sovereignty over what we now think of as the United States. 

This is as good a place as any to emphasize that phrase: “cultivated farms, houses, and community buildings.” If you, the reader, received a typical education in US history you will have been left with the impression that Native Americans simply roamed freely over their territories. People frequently post maps that unintentionally reinforce that misconception by putting tribal names on ill-defined areas. In contrast, I am including here a map showing the area that is western New York State today, and that people imagine was already New York 250 years ago. It presents the settlements as they were shortly before the American Revolution. Note that every one of those triangles is an Indigenous town, whether Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, or Oneida. The squares represent British forts. 

from Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, Helen Hornbeck Tanner

Do you notice what a different impression this gives? This is clearly the territory of the Haudenosaunee Confederation, regardless of what the British or the Americans wanted to pretend. I won't even show the typical maps of "The Thirteen Colonies" or "Native American Territories" because you have already seen them and I don't want to reinforce their misleading impression.

Another way of understanding just how developed these Native towns and farms were is by looking at Army records of their destruction. In 1779, during the Revolutionary War, George Washington ordered General John Sullivan and one-third of the Continental Army to raid that area and destroy the homes and crops. You will notice that I emphasize the number of troops Washington committed at a time when he was fighting the mighty British Army. It shows how difficult he thought the task would be, but also how important. The Continental troops burned forty towns, 160,000 bushels of corn, and an uncounted volume of fruits and vegetables. These were settled, well-developed communities. I’ll quote the US National Parks Service website:

Many of the troops were shocked upon entering these villages. They found not the crude bark huts or longhouses of "Savages," but instead orderly rows of houses built of hewn timbers and frame houses with windows. Well-cultivated vegetable fields extended out from the villages, along with extensive apple, peach, and cherry orchards. Many of these Indian villages rivaled or surpassed the towns that the soldiers had come from.

Again, I hope this changes your understanding of what it meant to steal Native land and why I employ a metaphor about some Russian oligarch seizing your house to build a theme park. And the same things were true about the Native lands seized in the south. Those thefts were not about building settlements in the forest. They were about white people taking Natives' houses, farms, orchards, and businesses. They were even about stealing furniture and utensils.

Back to Fletcher v. Peck. In 1795 the state of Georgia claimed lands west of its modern boundaries that included much of what is now Alabama and Mississippi, what was then called the Yazoo District. I say “claimed” not just because other states had conflicting claims, but also because it was the home of Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Muskogee Creeks who had never relinquished their own claims to that land, claims that were backed up by the fact that they actually lived there, and had been living there as long as anybody could remember, that their houses and towns and farms were there, that the graves of their ancestors were there. The Georgia State Legislature had no particular way of actually pressing this claim and so they knew they would soon have to cede that territory to the United States government. But before acknowledging it as US - not Georgia - territory the Georgia State Legislature sold that land (land they did not control) to real estate speculation companies for a little over a penny an acre, which was a ridiculously low price even then. The sale wasn’t just fraudulent because Georgia didn’t really own or control the land. It wasn’t just fraudulent because the price suggested a crony deal. It was fraudulent because virtually every member of the legislature who voted for it either were shareholders in the purchasing companies, or received bribes for their votes, or both. The scandal was so notorious that almost every one of them were kicked out by the voters in the next election. The new legislature immediately repudiated the sale, going so far as burning all copies of the original law in public.

In light of this repudiation, did the contested land belong to the speculators or not? The very public nature of the scandal made it hard for them to rely on public sympathy if they sued. But what if a third party brought suit? Somebody who was “innocent” because they purchased Yazoo land from the speculators without knowing about the scandal. In order to make such a case, the speculators arranged a sale to a collaborator, arranged for that purchaser to sue them (the speculators), and even hired an attorney to represent the man suing them! 

The first thing you should know is that the attorney for the “defendant” (the speculators) was himself one of those speculators, a member of Congress who left office in order to argue the lawsuit and who was subsequently made a Justice of the Court less than a year later. The second thing you should know is that Chief Justice John Marshall, while not directly involved in the Yazoo lands, was a speculator in other Native lands for which there was also no actual title. You will not be surprised, then, to learn that the Court decided in favor of the speculators, insisting that the new Georgia legislature had no authority to nullify a sale by the previous legislature, regardless of how much bribery and self-dealing there had been in making that sale. But there was no discussion of whether Georgia had a right to sell Native land. That is simply assumed!

What the Court could never do through its decision was make the Yazoo district available to white settlers in the real world. First the US Army had to fight a series of wars against the Native inhabitants. Then Congress had to pass an Indian Removal Act to bar the Indigenous people from their own homes. Then the Army had to go again to actually remove them.

And that is not the end of the federal subsidy to the speculators. They didn’t really want the land themselves, of course. They just wanted to profit on the difference between the penny an acre they paid and the price they could get from the white people who did want to move there. And those people couldn’t possibly afford it without being offered credit by the US government.  More on that in another post.