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.

Settler Colonialism

 Let us imagine for a moment that some Russian (or Saudi or Singaporean) billionaire decided to turn your neighborhood into a truck depot (or exclusive waterpark or luxury high-rise block).

Let’s imagine that this billionaire claimed to have bought the property from someone with some spurious claim to it. When their employees show up and tell you that your home is scheduled for demolition you and your neighbors object. So they turn to the Russian (or Saudi or Singaporean) military to evict all of you. The only reason this scenario feels implausible to a white American is because the US military is stronger than those others. So you’ll have to imagine for a moment that it isn’t.

This is the essence of settler colonialism. One important reason for the American Revolution was that the colonies were issuing warrants for Native lands west of the Appalachians and the British government wouldn’t support those claims. (Let’s note that the reason was not concern for the rights of Indigenous peoples; it was Parliament’s reluctance to fund a new war against the Natives while they were already heavily indebted for the Seven-Years’ War against the French.) George Washington was one of the leading speculators in those Trans-Appalachian grants.

So 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.

This pattern continued all the way to the Pacific. Did you think that when Napoleon sold Jefferson 828,000 square miles of land, including all or part of thirteen states, he actually owned it? Or even controlled it? The basis of France’s claim to what they called Louisiana was just that: they claimed it. The exact same thing was true of the 529,000 square miles, including 7 states, that the United States forced Mexico to sell after occupying their capital city. And the 586,000 square miles of Alaska for which the US gave Russia 2¢ an acre.

All this land was home to a vast population of indigenous people who had been living there always. I won’t begin to discuss here the verbal gymnastics US courts have gone through to pretend it was legal to mount the subsequent military operations to evict the Native occupants and to replace them with white people (and the Black people they enslaved to make this eviction economically productive.) For over a hundred years after the American Revolution the US Army fought against Indigenous peoples to get actual and not just pretended sovereignty over what we now think of as the United States. The maps in your history book showing the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican Cession, and the Oregon Treaty obscure all of this by pretending that diplomats in capitals many thousands of miles away had the legal authority to dispose of territory that they never even controlled. 

Adas Israel LA

 I am more than discomfited by people blocking access to a synagogue. I hate the menacing, macing, cursing, and physically attacking the people entering, or anybody around wearing a kippah. I am sickened by self-styled allies of Palestine who enter a subway car - masked! -  and demand that any Zionists present raise their hands. All that shit is simply indefensible. 

But I am also deeply shamed by friends who are quick to denounce these things and imply that their adversaries who do not also denounce them are hypocritical when they themselves are silent about the demolition of the Great Omari Mosque, the Khalid bin al Waleed Mosque, the Church of St. Porphyria’s, etc. by the IDF. They are all quick to say that Hamas combatants use the churches and mosques of Gaza without knowing anything whatever in particular about the individual case.

Welcoming real estate pimps who are selling condos on land that has yet to even be transferred by colonial courts may not be as bad as hiding the perpetrators of the atrocities of October 7. But then again, the antisemitic hoods in LA didn’t raze Adas Israel to the ground.

Last month we learned of a committee of billionaires who offered to purchase Mayor Adams’s police action to break up student protest camps at Columbia and NYU. Today Reuters reports on largely-secret influence operations by the government of Israel inside the US Congress and elsewhere. But when people call attention to these things they are accused of employing old antisemitic tropes. This reminds me of the definition of chutzpah: murdering your parents and asking for the mercy of the court as an orphan. We live in a bizarro universe in which Marjorie Taylor Greene(!), who traffics regularly in antisemitic conspiracy theories (Jewish space lasers?)  feels free to denounce the “disgusting antisemitism” of the Democratic Party. I am at a loss.