Outside Agitators

US liberals are now aghast that a foreign country could interfere in some capacity with their right to run their own elections. While that may have been the case in some limited capability, local electoral riggings and voter disenfranchisement—as well as the wholly undemocratic process of the electoral college, which, for the second time in 16 years stole an election from the popular vote—were without a doubt the overwhelming factors. Yet MSNBC is not running nonstop coverage on the inequities in the US electoral system. And while the gears of war are churning among both the Right and the Center, the idea of payback being a mother never sits well. The US often and continually interferes in the elections of nearly every other country and directly or indirectly tries to overthrow the democratically elected (sometimes not, admittedly) leaders of other nations (most recently Venezuela  and Nicaragua), which disrupts their development and kills countless civilians. Liberals will sometimes acknowledge that while this may be true, two wrongs don’t make a right—yet no one is trying to dismantle the CIA or the ironically-named National Endowment for Democracy, the backdoor “humanitarian agency” USAID, the John Bolton-led and fiercely undemocratic NSA, NATO, or the IMF; instead, liberals are more likely to trust them now than before. But there’s more to this narrative, a deeply embedded American Exceptionalism that insists that America is united and ultimately good, and that any claims to the contrary are Whatabouttisms meant to divide us.

There are some notable similarities between the controversy surrounding Russiagate and the Civil Rights Movement: the accusation that agitation is not natural; that division and struggle is alien and therefore wrong; that America is an exceptional land where people are happy and know their place. This becomes exceptionally clear when we talk about many of the posts supposedly created by Kremlin-backed Russian bots or hackers that highlight racial strife. These tend to be in themselves based on anti-blackness, such as the palpable fear in this CNN shit-piece on black men taking self-defense classes. Or an Atlanta-based NPR reporter warning about a Black activist having done guest spots on Russia’s state-funded Sputnik Radio (which airs in DC[1]). The fact that NPR is also state-funded is apparently immaterial. On NPR’s Morning Talk, a reporter dismisses Black leftists and activists such as Anoa Changa and Eugene Puryear as agents of Russian influence:

Like RT, U.S. national security agencies say Sputnik [Radio] is part of Russia’s propaganda machine. The network gives Changa another platform to get her message out. She denounces what she calls racial injustice and oppression. These concerns fall in line with what experts call a key message of Russian propaganda – amplifying existing political and social divisions. [Emphasis mine]

Notice the terminology: “Russia’s propaganda machine”; “what she calls”; “Russian propaganda: amplifying… divisions”.

In the space of half a minute, this nationally-aired and revered National Public Radio show twice calls Black American activist Anoa Changa an agent of Russian propaganda.

Changa sees this tactic as erasure and harmfully racist:

As you can imagine, there isn’t much appetite for this kind of work in mainstream media. So I have my own podcast, and when I’m invited to speak to larger platforms, I do so, gratefully.

Recently, I took such an invitation and appeared as a guest on “By Any Means Necessary,” a radio show hosted by Eugene Puryear and Sean A. Blackmon on Radio Sputnik. Sputnik is a news agency established by the Russian government-controlled news agency Rossiya Segodnya. And yet Eugene, Sean, and their producer maintain editorial freedom in developing and producing their content.

I certainly maintain my independence when I go on their show, talking about the issues that matter to me. I do not consult with the Russian government before I speak my mind, nor do I care what they think about what I say. There aren’t a lot of mainstream platforms that give voice to left-wing Black activists, and Puryear and Blackmon do. On the most recent interview we discussed the glaring issues with Trump’s Economic Executive Order…

In four minutes, Kauffman [the NPR reporter] destroyed my credibility and my reputation, for the crime of not having access to the kinds of American state funded media that he, a white man, is freely given access to.

Fortunately, according to her own report, local activists and (somewhat surprisingly) more mainstream non-profits did not distance themselves from her, which is a testament of her own work as others have been harassed and blackballed for similar accusations.

For liberals to call for the return of Joe McCarthy is disgusting. This redbaiting and red scare has real, practical implications and harm. What’s telling about this new Red Scare is the connections between it and the anti-Black stench of “outside agitators”. It is an ethos that argues that Black people and other oppressed populations are and have been satisfied with a status quo that alienates, suppresses, and oppresses them. Further, the underlying assumption is that Black people could never think of organizing and taking action against their oppressors and would not think of defending themselves were it not for an alien and sinister force stirring up trouble.

Product of outside interference? Russiabot?

Of course these accusations of outside agitation sound familiar to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement. I would assume most liberals are familiar with the charges laid against the likes of not just King, SNCC, and the SCLC, but the local, often unheralded leaders, marchers, singers, corps. Which suggests that liberals are aware of what they’re doing, but just don’t care. Why else would they accuse Black and other oppressed and poor people of being idiotic and essentially satisfied with their positions, besides being shot down on the sidewalks while running away from cops, being denied basic protections while working, being run over by cars while marching in the streets? They would rather capitulate to regressive, anti-black standards and appease reactionaries in order to align against a supposed enemy[2] that they believe assisted a common enemy—a behemoth of horror, surely, but one who is primarily aided and abetted by these same standards of racism and status quo protection that the accused “Russian agents” are protesting against.

As long as liberals continue to individualize their resistance—fighting against personalities rather than against a pathological ideology which causes material harm—they will continue to cause rather than alleviate suffering. It’s almost like they do not seek liberation, but only softer chains.

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[1] Disclaimer for what it’s worth: I have begun listening to Eugene Puryear’s By Any Means Necessary show via podcast. It’s good stuff, imo.

[2] Can we sometime talk about how Russia is a supposed enemy while Saudi Arabia actually had a part in attacking us? Russia wasn’t an official enemy at the time, nor is it now, strictly speaking. For that matter, how are Iran or Cuba enemies as they do not pose a threat to us and, if we’re counting human rights violations, that’s just fucking laughable coming from the United States.

A Deferred Dream Action

When the Dream Act was being watered-down, stalled, heavily-militarized, rejected, watered-down some more, and rejected again, this heavily affected many of my clients, students at a community college. These were young adults who came here as children, had lived highly respectable lives, went to college and tried to do the right thing, according to the unrealistic, hubristic standards of the American Dream. Many of them—born in but coming from Latin American but sometimes Middle Eastern, South Asian, and the African regions—were relieved when then-President Obama announced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

The DACA program was a temporary stop-gap measure for young immigrants (Generation 1.5, and under 32 years of age, as of 2012) who come here as children, graduated from high school, know English, and have completely spotless records that allowed them to register every two years for the chance to obtain an official state identification. These are students who traversed the traps of a country and society that highly problematize and criminalize them. They are raised in an environment of fear and secrecy, not necessarily of their own communities or families (though like any other demographic, that can be the case as well) but of being ripped from their families, communities, homes, and often the only country they know.

This existential fear is not a result of their innate badness or goodness or anything else. For immigration is a necessary lifeblood to both industry and to global capitalism. Yes, often immigrants are used as pawns to drive down the cost of labor, but that is to say that capitalists will not pay living wages and will use others to wedge in those “costs” – and further drive their theft – any way they can. At first it was indentured servanthood, then chattel slavery, then Jim Crow, then the Bracero program. Initially, the program was to bring in seasonal laborers (aka, guest workers) across the border, largely for agricultural work. When the Braceros began to settle permanently, have families, and organize their labor, then the corporations and their puppet state began striking back. In 1954, Eisenhower’s Immigration and Naturalization Services began the “Wetback Program” to round up immigrant workers who were not covered under the Bracero Program. Ten years later, when Mexican immigrants made up a full 15% of the farmhand labor force, the program ended as unions, churches, and competing demanded that both nationalized and guest workers’ wages be raised.

Immigrant rights were raised when Cesar Chavez’s joined together with Filipino migrant workers to protest grape growers’ lowering wages on the Filipino’s to undercut Mexican wages. The groups recognized that they were being pit against each other and worked together to demand fair wages from the landowners. And it worked. For fifteen years, while their wages were never at-par with the median for non-farmhands, they rose considerably. Seasonal farm laborers enjoyed a massive uptick in material conditions as a result of cross-sector solidarity and heavy organizing.

I point this out not simply as a history lesson from merely one group of workers and only a couple of immigrant groups, though the past informs the present and the future. But in light of the fact that the political parties will only serve capitalism and in doing so will seek out to destroy communities that do not meet their needs or have outserved their purpose—this includes immigrant families. Because they seek cheap labor that they can easily exploit we find this alternation between temporary, compromised rights under Democrats and permanent raids under the openly xenophobic and nativist Republicans (especially under Trump).

While DACA gave many young adults a fresh hope and materially benefited them with access to jobs, forms of valid ID, and more affordable college,[1] it only accounts for 10% of the most ‘exceptional’ immigrants (those who arrived by the age of 16, are younger than 32, have graduated high school and do not have a criminal record) and thus places all immigrants in an impossible situation of having to be super role models while under intense scrutiny in a highly criminalized climate in order to be accepted by the wider society, or to live and operate largely underground.

Additionally, the temporary fix that is DACA relied upon the idea that Obama would be replaced with someone of a like mind. The fact that this like-minded person was 1) facing off against an explicitly racist nativist and 2) herself having just repeated an astoundingly horrid nativist sentiment regarding refugee children should have alerted us all to the fact that the work, even the work for that dream-like 10%, was not complete, would not be near complete. The fact that now Donald Trump, Steve Miller, and all the fascists at ICE (and everyone who works at ICE is a fascist; don’t @ me!) have access to all this biometric information recipients is terrifying and incredibly irresponsible on the part of Obama. Further, that even the most-left-leaning national politician, Bernie Sanders, repeated nativist rhetoric about immigrants as themselves actors in lowering wages means that we are going to have to look beyond an electoral strategy.

We are left with the brazen fact that our politicians are failing us, that we must rely on each other. That capitalists only care about profit margins means that whatever actions they are willing to take for immigrant rights will be just enough to maintain their machines and not disrupt them. It is up to us, workers, to band together to make sure that everyone, regardless of race, gender, where they were born, or immigration status, is treated fairly and justly, has enough to eat, adequate income, a decent place to live, freedom from oppression and constant surveillance, and sufficient security. This cannot happen if we allow Nativism, White Supremacy, and Patriarchy—the tools of capitalism—to organize us. It cannot happen if we are mobilized through Islamophobia[2] or the impetus of a police state.

Together, fighting for and with the marginalized amongst us, on their terms, we have nothing to lose but our chains.

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[1] Including many of my student clients, some of whom came out of hiding to go back to school

[2] http://www.rawstory.com/2017/09/bank-has-entire-arab-american-family-arrested-after-father-tries-to-deposit-large-check-from-home-sale/

Evangelicals: The Sheepdogs of Capitalism [preview]

The following is from a long essay published on my Patreon page. To read the whole thing, you’ll need to become a subscriber. But you’ll get so much more, including books, chapters, poems, and other fun essays you can’t find anywhere else.

The lagger in this study is organized religion, which by necessity of sacredness takes its sweet time to make change. Since religion needs to codify through theological and linguistic practice, its values tend to run behind the elite culture it mediates for. God doesn’t change, except when God does. And God always needs justification, and for that justification to spread, for the text is sacred and God is eternal. However, this lagging provides a function in capitalism, that of the sheep dog. Preachers and religious functionaries help to keep the regular folk in line until they are ready to be absorbed into capitalism’s newer schemes.

In my experience, the organized religion most closely aligned with capitalism is White Evangelicalism. Evangelicalism is a pan-Protestant movement that has erased denominational differences (similarly to how whiteness has erased ethnic and class distinctions between Euro-Americans) to focus on a salvation moment that relies on an hyper-individualistic relationship with Jesus. This in tune with the fact that Evangelicalism is rooted among the White suburban mid-management bourgeois class puts it at a unique position to serve the interests of the capitalist class while maintaining forms of power within the state and worker systems.

Back in the DPRK; You Don’t Know How Lucky You Be

North Korea, or as it’s officially known, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), has been living as a war zone for the last 60+ years. It has undergone a genocidal project begun when the US bombed and wiped away a fifth of the population and continuing under increasing efforts to sanction it to oblivion by the UN Security Council and the US. The country, its peoples, and its leaders have been the constant butt of racist demagoguery within the United States media (you can see that clearly in comedies such as Team America: World Police and The Interview). And the mass media — the same people who gave us Trump and then lamented when he turned on them — has been fever-pitch promoting all-out war with the country for basically trying to defend itself with a handful of nuclear bombs (with limited range). Now Kim Jong Un has threatened to bomb Guam, a colony of the United States with a large military presence (large as in it accounts for  1/3 of the island, 10% of the population but leaves no revenue for the island country) if the US continues to press it.

The United States can destroy the world several times over with its range of bombs and has actually detonated a couple on top of large civilian centers. Who has or is holding us accountable? We are literally the World’s Police. American Exceptionalism in foreign policy also means we cannot try Trump for the war crimes he’s already committed and is now brazenly threatening. Thanks Obama!

Robert Jeffres, the tyrant of First Baptist Church of Dallas and pastor to the tyrants, suggested that God has ordained Trump to take out Kim Jung Un. But what if–and hear me out here–what if it’s the other way around? What if God has ordained Kim to take out Trump?

While we’re infused in propaganda on every side (and without a doubt, the DPRK engages in some nasty propfiction as well) genocidal propaganda is the worst and needs to be countered the most. The idea that Kim Jong Un is hell-bent on unilaterally striking the US or our allies is one such piece of blatant agitprop that must be shut down in any and all directions. As long as it is allowed to pulse through mass media, in bedrooms and boardrooms, and especially in both houses of horrors,  then we are responsible for the deaths of upwards of 25,370,000 human beings and every animal within the realm of the DPRK–not to mention other regional casualties such as in South Korea (Republic of Korea – ROK) or those who suffer due to promised retaliation. This after being largely responsible for the deaths of 20% of the North Korean population after our desire to wipe communism from the entire peninsula.

Retaliation isn’t the key word, as it makes it sound as if Kim and the leadership of the DPRK are merely pissy and violent by nature, but it hints at the uneven power dynamics here. The United States is the only country in the world that operates on a Strike First platform. It regularly performs -either directly through its military or indirectly through its intelligence and backdoor negotiations- coups and regime changes throughout the world. It also has a thousand times the nuclear weapons that the DPRK has.

Speaking of CIA agitprop, regime changes, wars of aggression in Asia, and Dick pics…

However, the US has historically and currently talked about its nuclear arsenal in terms of protection and last-option alternative, as a measure of prevention. And for whatever reason, the world rarely questions it. Yet, here is Kim saying the same exact thing, but without the rampaging, world-conquering history that the United States has, and it’s reported in Western media as if he’s crazy and ready to blow up your grandma and her doggy if they look at him funny.

But it’s not Kim who ordered a Tomahawk missile strike on Syria, killing hundreds of civilians, under completely false pretenses. It’s not Kim who was unquestionably praised and “finally became our president” when he killed those families by the same press telling us Kim is unhinged and dangerous. And it’s not the DPRK that sold weapons and gives complicit support to Saudi Arabia in its decimation of Yemen, killing tens of thousands. So why in tf’ing world would anybody trust the US, let alone Donald J Trump on this, but not the DPRK and Kim Jong Un?

If nepotism is your answer, pfft. Like the US isn’t run by the nepotist class? At this point, the entire discussion by US pundits and politicians is nothing more than an unsolicited d*ck pick, but with far more dangerous ramifications. Get on the phone and tell your senators to put that thing away.

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Note: This essay was first published in two separate entries last week on my new Patreon page. If you want news you can use when you can use it, check it out and put it in your regular rotation. And consider becoming a subscriber. For between as little as $3-5 a month, you can have exclusive access to new long form essays, poems, chapters from upcoming books and entire books!

What I Was Thinking as a Compassionate Conservative

Cross-posted from Medium.

I voted for Bush in 2000, not because I hated poor people or was racist against people of color, but largely because I was both poor and a person of color who was under the impression that he had something valuable to offer us. As a conservative Christian, I was introduced to WORLD Magazine and Marvin Olasky in the 90’s. Olasky — one of several supposed ex-communists with a dubious past and a lying streak — talked a lot about ‘compassionate conservatism’ and the need for conservative (read: White and Middle Class) Christians to support urban people. He argued that we depended on a government that could only fail us and got in the way of success. And who doesn’t want to succeed. So, yes, I voted for the first time on the premise that I was doing good for myself and my community. I think that’s why and how most people vote, and thus positioning material needs as front and center is the key to success. Or the Party of the People can just continue to treat politics as a character-driven drama, I guess…

In the early 90’s, Marv wrote The Tragedy of American Compassion. Newt Gingrich passed it out as homework for incoming representatives during the second wave of the so-called “Reagan Revolution”, helping to lead to the welfare “reforms” of the 90’s as well as the Contract <s>for</s> on America. At the same time, he became an adviser to then-Texas governor George W Bush and helped lay the groundwork for Bush’s faith-based initiatives.

But it was all a lie. All of Olasky’s ‘scholarship’ was hackneyed ideology promoting a spiritualized Free Market approach with a Christian veneer. It was Right Wing Christian deception.

The idea that White Christians could save us poor city folk would prove to be problematic, to say the least, for various reasons. But at the time I didn’t have the vocabulary or experience to tell me. I saw the word help; I understood help. I knew that white suburban Christians had resources and thought they could assist us with those. I didn’t know it was a mining exhibition and that we were the ones to be mined.

Unlike many anti-welfare actors, I never bought the lie that welfare was theft from taxpayers. I knew that was bullshit because we sure as hell weren’t living high off the hog. But I did see welfare as an impediment to working and living securely. What I thought about were the kids I was working with. The kids of single parents, often, who were themselves heading towards gangs. I thought that the continuation of welfare reform would be the necessary shock to the system bringing good jobs and stable homes. Instead, ‘compassion’ brought unprecedented levels of extreme poverty, intense competition for lower-paying jobs, and the destabilization of neighborhoods through gentrification. It didn’t lead to more secure communities through the advancement and strengthening of nuclear families (another perspective fraught with racist and bourgeois assumptions, as well as completely unnecessary), but less-secure communities.

I think I believed in compassionate conservatism not only because I hadn’t yet seen the extent of economic deprivation and theft in Working Class communities of color and other abandoned WC communities. I hadn’t understood the extent to which resources have been mined (both economically and literally) out of our communities and with no replacement. But at the time, I knew and saw the desperation of my Black and Brown Working Class community and my own Working Class family, which had received government subsidies before and after my father lost his employment to privatization, alcohol abuse, and epilepsy. [1]

However, I didn’t make the connection until now. Welfare before the Reaganites and the New Democrats altered it was not going to work on its own because it saw money to poor families as merely a form of aid. It should have realized — as conservativism and more-compassionate liberalism certainly still fail to realize — that child-raising is work. That domestic labor is work. That parents, and particularly mothers, should be paid to take care of children. Children are vital to the lifeblood of a society no matter the economic system of that society.

Instead, women are paid less money than men on the capitalist assumption that certain gendered- and class-based labors should be underpaid or even unpaid. Capitalism assumes that those who labor for society should not only be unrewarded, but should fend for themselves when the chips are down.

This bears out in the gender wage gap. Human Resources justifies, a woman isn’t the primary bread-winner for the home and thus doesn’t need a comfortable standard of living. This old excuse may not (yet still is) vocalized in these politically correct times, but the spirit is still here and thriving in the Gig Economy. Pregnancies are seen as interruptions from work — and thus income — rather than as a form of valuable, creative work in and of themselves. Pregnancies are punished, even before the conservative agendas interrupting reproductive rights and personal autonomy.

Domestic work is a public service. And domestic laborers should be paid accordingly by the public. As long as we’re under capitalism, then all parents should be financially compensated.

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[1] The order of these items tells you something about causation.

Right Behind, newest book, is out now!

Working on a couple of other books to be published soon (second edition of Shout It from the Rooftops and its follow-up on Individualism within Evangelicalism), but want to give you an opportunity to see this book, a barnstormer I wrote after my wife, Susanna Krizo, as we were coming back from a long walk and Thai restauranting, asked what would happen if Christians discovered they were following the antiChrist of the Left Behind series all along?

It’s called Right Behind: A Left Behind Parody for the Trump Times, and it’s available now for Kindle at $2.99 (or Kindle Unlimited for free) and on paperback (Amazon and CreateSpace) for $6.90. It’s a funny and breezy read (or at least I think so), and hopefully as fun to read as it was to write.

 

White God, the Immature President

Understanding why Trump is highly favored among White Evangelicals despite his obvious moral failures (at least by their Victorian era standards) one needs to understand that first, it is a tradition and movement based on words. Iterations, preaching, testimony, prayer, singing. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Additionally, faith comes by hearing and by hearing the Word of God. The Word of God is a double-edged sword, able to discern…

Repeating the words of the faith in a convincing manner is the central sacrament of Evangelicalism.

The primary thing that Illegitimate POTUS needs to do is sound like a Christian. Just a few words sprinkled here and there, little dog-whistles like George W. But it’s interesting that not only is Trump not fluent in Evangelicalism, but neither is his speechwriter and Reich-Hand Nazi. He’s a white supremacist writer who speaks very broadly about God, but in a newspeak manner. So there’s obviously something else going on here.

Another aspect of contemporary Evangelicalism (and this aspect is recent and a result of its being mobilized for conservative issues starting in the 70s) are its heterodox creeds. There are the classic creeds of Evangelicalism: Preach Jesus Christ dead, buried and resurrected; believe and confess the Lord Jesus Christ; have a personal relationship with God. The personal relationship aspect is central to the classic definition of what makes one an evangelical.*

But in the politicized White Evangelicalism of the Religious Right era now there are a few more to honor. In some ways these new creeds are more integral and important than the ancient beliefs, particularly the negative dogma of opposing abortion. This dogma is negative and oppositional, notice, where the older ones are positive and creative. White Evangelicals have a prayer: “Abortion is murder! Forever and ever amen.”

There are other tenets of White Evangelicalism which aren’t as universal but may help understand their support of Trump:

• Israel is God’s chosen nation. But not Jewish people (cf End Times)
• America is God’s new chosen
• Disposability is good as the earth is disposable (cf End Times)
• Women are subservient and never fully human.

So Trump’s politics or political promises certainly help White Evangelicals to adore their president no matter his grasp of the rest of Christian tradition. But there’s something more, still.

That is that Trump reminds them of their God.

The underlying but unspoken (yet never to be transgressed) rule of White Evangelicalism is that God is a White Male Capitalist. And not capitalist as in: Upholds the tenets of capitalism (which He does), but: He belongs to the class. This God represents the Capitalist class, the firstborn among peers, the Bourgeoisie of the Bourgeoisie.

President Baby with his impetuous, genocidal behavior is White God incarnate.

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*As I argue in my upcoming book, Free Market Jesus, this individualism is both a central element to the flourishing and now the death-knells of White Evangelicalism. Sign up to the newsletter for some updates including excerpts from the book.

 

“Food Is a Weapon”

From theologian James Cone’s The Black Church and Marxism: What Do They Have to Say to Each Other? (paper delivered in 1980):

I have been convinced that the black church cannot remain silent regarding socialism, because such silence will be interpreted by our Third World brothers and sisters as support for the capitalistic system which exploits the poor all over this earth.

For example, between 25,000 and 50,000 people die each day from starvation, a cause that is directly related to the persistence of national and international economic orders that foster distorted development. The former secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, well known for his racial slurs, said it bluntly: “Food is a weapon. It is now one of the principal tools of our negotiating kit.”

From a Rolling Stone story covering the Republican National Convention in 76, while Earl Butz was still Secretary of Agriculture (content note for racist/sexist remarks):

Pat [Boone] posed a question: “John and I were just discussing the appeal of the Republican party. It seems to me that the party of Abraham Lincoln could and should attract more black people. Why can’t that be done?” This was a fair question for the secretary, who is also a very capable politician.

“I’ll tell you why you can’t attract coloreds,” the secretary proclaimed as his mischievous smile returned. “Because colored only wants three things. You know what they want?” he asked Pat.

Pat shook his head no; so did I.

“I’ll tell you what coloreds want. It’s three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit. That’s all!”

Pat gulped twice.

Butz resigned a few days after calls were made for his head, but he claimed he did it on his own (that seems unlikely) and that he did nothing wrong.

A few thoughts on reading these:

• Remember that Pat Boone was himself a nice racist, hired to whitewash the Race Music (as in, Rhythm & Blues and early Rock N Roll that sounded too black) for the innocent White Christian kids across America.
• Butz clearly outlined his racial animosity, and did so to a reporter and a famous musician. In the open. At a national convention. In the post-Civil Rights era. Don’t think that it isn’t still happening. Paul Ryan may be more careful about his views now, but he’s still racially animositic; in large part because class warfare is his life.
• Butz was in control of food and production as a kind of supermanager of agrarian companies. What does it mean to black and brown farmers and consumers to have a white racist in charge of food supply and farming justice in the Land of Plenty? Why did it take a directly racist comment to get him fired when he admitted elsewhere that he’d use food as a weapon?
• Butz was hired by Nixon and stayed under Ford. Until this article spread, no one deemed it fit to question how he operated, only what he said when they were dirty jokes.
• George W Bush, Reagan and Nixon had a lot of the same characteristics of the Illegitimate President of the United States, but with some charm and/or intelligence and, by degrees only, humility. Many of the safeguards that Trump has taken out or will take out were already proposed or committed by the earlier three. What now is different besides the degree and the speed to which he’s taking it? What sets “p*ssy grabber” apart from Reagan who defunded family planning globally and domestically? I’m convinced that language plays a big part of it. Language and bluster.
• Like Butz, Trump has no shame. None. Don’t expect Trump to go willingly, either. And since he has no shame and is a blundering racist, sexist, classist idiot, he’s a perfect cover for Republicans who can always say that they were forced to follow Trump, even though they’re informing him and using his bluster as a cover. Expect Medicaid and Food Stamps to be cut, with or without Trump’s blessing. Because food is a weapon.

Franklin Graham: The Bible Is Silent About Welcoming Sojourners and Refugees

Here’s Graham to the Huffington Post on how he can square his and Trump’s literal, political xenophobia (literally, stoking fear of outsiders) carried out in Trump’s executive order to ban immigrants and refugees from several Muslim-dominated countries with his Christianity:

It’s not a biblical command for the country to let everyone in who wants to come, that’s not a Bible issue. We want to love people, we want to be kind to people, we want to be considerate, but we have a country and a country should have order and there are laws that relate to immigration and I think we should follow those laws. Because of the dangers we see today in this world, we need to be very careful.

Contrary to the Culture Warrior Christian’s idiotic statement, it’s not only a biblical command for Christians, it’s a biblical command for nations. Recall that the Bible wasn’t written to individuals, but to communities, from the Israelites to the early Church.

When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God. – Leviticus 19:33-34 (NIV)

This idea is repeated in Deuteronomy 10:19 and Exodus 22:21: Do not oppress a foreigner, for you yourselves were mistreated foreigners in Egypt.

Throughout the Jewish scriptures, the idea is reiterated time and again as both a national story and as a decree, not only should the immigrant (or stranger or refugee) be welcomed, but treated, befriended, and loved as any other member of the community. Deuteronomy 27, in fact, curses those who mistreat the stranger. The effect is one of continual remembrance; the act of welcoming the stranger is one of communal redemption.

Welcoming sojourners is seen as a definite sign of following God’s commandments. Job, for instance, refers to his good deeds of hospitality toward strangers (in chapters 29 and 31).

Throughout the Older Testament scriptures*, the idea that the Hebrews were aliens, were stuck in a foreign land, and were strange to their own God is reiterated so that the people could empathize with the traveler – those who are forced out of their own land and into a new land, as was Abraham and the people under Moses and Joshua. The Lost. This is a prominent story of Israel, that of a people who were oppressed foreigners and travelers who found a home among God and remember this story through their own hospitality toward foreigners and travelers.

And then there’s Jesus and the New Testament, expanding this national story into Jesus himself (who Matthew recounts as a refugee fleeing the genocidal Herod into Egypt) and then his disciples and Christians themselves (Jesus tells his first followers to go town to town as strangers and accept hospitality, which is expanded in the Great Commission [Go out into all the world and make disciples]; Paul recalls the story before Mars Hill in Acts through an elaborate evangelistic call; Peter does so explaining the new order of Christ-followers on the multilingual Pentecost). The story of strangers being accepted by the community and the parents becomes the story of Christianity, spread throughout the Pauline letters and other epistles as well as through the Gospels themselves.

In Matthew 25, Jesus makes it clear that those who welcome and are hospitable to  the stranger are welcoming him; that those who reject the stranger reject him.

The Newer Testament book of Hebrews again retells the national story of Israel, God’s people, as being aliens and strangers and then closes to remind the expanded people of God (according to Christian theology) to:

Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured. (Chapter 13. NRSV)

[Oh, now there’s that pesky commandment about torture and imprisonment, both of which Franklin Graham is silent about as his presidential preference is promising to increase.]

In short, we see that while White Evangelicalism promises to be exclusively biblical in following Christ, it is fundamentally cultural, which is to say it is foundationally a linguistic and political theology that establishes and reinforces Whiteness. Franklin Graham is emblematic of this approach, this sin, this heresy of White Theology.

Not that I’m working on a book about this or anything… **

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*For instance, Genesis 15:13; 23:4; Psalm 39:12; 105:12; 119:19; I Chronicles 16:19; 29:15; Leviticus 25:23, 35

** I am working on a book about this. Really, two books. Please subscribe to the newsletter for updates.

Uber & The 606: The Worth and Work of Women of Color in the Neoliberalism Era

While riding with my daughter the other morning, we traveled down the new above-ground park-slash-bike/jogging trail called conversely The Bloomingdale Trail and The 606. While grabbing some water on the way up the 606, I noticed the trail was extra busy, with many joggers and walkers as it was such a brilliant, nice day. Two joggers I noticed in particular were white women just coming out of an Uber driven by a black woman. The moment was too delicious for simple irony, yet too bitter to b satisfying.

For those unfamiliar with the history of the Bloomingdale Trail, a railroad line heavy with cargo used to pass through the Chicago neighborhoods of Bucktown, Logan Square, and Humboldt Park. While the lines it adjoins to the west are still in heavy use, over the last fifteen or so years, the nearly three mile stretch grew weeds and would occasionally host the straggling jogger.

Bloomingdale Trail pre-park via Field Guide to Nature

About ten years ago, members of the Logan Square and Humboldt Park communities would meet to discuss plans for how to use the railway to benefit the neighborhoods. At this time, both neighborhoods were largely working class LatinX and – with the exception of the large and beautiful Humboldt Park and the boulevard system running through it – possessed very little green or public space. So they began a dream of turning the infrastructure of the railway into a pedestrian park.

This dream was fast-tracked some years later under Mayor Rahm Emanuel when he realized this park was a way to build up a tax revenue base. Which is to say it was a good way to build more outside interest in an area already facing massive gentrification. The months surrounding its opening saw people being priced out of their homes as nearby rents dramatically increased 40-100% and long-term homeowners were scared off by the prospect of substantially higher tax rates.

Normally not as festive. Credit: Adam Alexander Photography via The Trust for Public Land

What is becoming common knowledge in gentrified Chicago is that our city uses good things to draw in wealthier and wealthier people – not just to build a tax base, but to drive the poor apart from their collective actions so there is little recourse left but to give up. It is systemic disengagement and disunion of Black and Brown communities. This is especially lethal as Black and Brown communities cannot rely on common or familial wealth, nor of basic services. Thus they must and do rely on support networks in their communities. 

So gentrification isn’t making the community better, it’s using long-delayed improvements of the community which were called by the community to displace and fracture that same living and fighting community and replace it with a permanently mobile economic force. One that either cannot or does not need to fight back.

Logan Square Neighborhood Assn protest against gentrification. Photo by Tyler ReViere via Chicagoist

What gentrification does to black and brown communities, however, the Sharing Economy as highlighted by Uber does to worker communities.

The taxi business has largely been run by immigrants and, while far from perfect, has been a means for people of color to survive when few other options are available. Because of the intimacy of the ride, the dangers of the road, the semi-freelancing of the gig, the potential violence that drivers face, the taxi business relied on safeguards such as unionization, licensing, and medallion-winning to protect the consumer and the worker.

Most of these regulations have been sidestepped by the would-be taxis in the ride-sharing business. When Uber and Lyft, et al, came to Chicago, the neoliberal administration headed by Emanuel did away with most of those regulations. But they came with technology that made it easier and faster to hail a cab, as well as an economic structure that made too much sense on the face of it. In its introductory phase, the cost of a ride in an Uber was considerably cheaper than one in a taxicab. Outside of the share that is given to Uber for the technology and use, the rest is given to the driver-owner, who is not leasing a car but using their own. Of course, this model is only possible because the driver is not an employee (and thus the costs of living are transferred to someone else, such as other employers, the drivers, and the government) and thus Uber gets to have and eat its cake.

However, in a model learned from Wal-Mart, as this cheaper model of taxiing begins to saturate the market, it forces out the old cab drivers and their unions – the communities that they built up. As the competition is being gutted, Uber raises the fees for both the consumer and the contractor. This has already started happening at certain peak hours, where costs are exponentially higher.

So Uber will eventually out-Uber itself as a de-unionized, untrained, and even unvetted workforce rises to replace an older community of working class people of color, only to themselves be ushered out by more desperate people looking for even fewer scraps.

In short, more working class women of color will be driving more professional class white people to a park dreamt up by working class women of color but implemented by professional class white people in order to drive out the working class women of color – but for less and less payout.

The Age of Late Neoliberalism is especially adept at not just taking crises and turning them into opportunities for the Investor Class, but also at taking lovely things – often things we create – and turning those against us. See for instance how the city of Chicago turns neighborhood parks into music festivals (often featuring artists of color from working class roots) as an aid in gentrification and homeless erasure. Or how art, artists, and art fests have been used to displace Logan Square residents (while LatinX and Black art are still drastically underfunded starting at the school level). Notice how a Logan Square developer/evil landlord boasts about investing in neighborhood as a means to drastically raise rents.

Despite these tactics, enjoy the beautiful and the lovely. I travel the 606 with pride, as do many WCPOC. This is our neighborhood. We’ve lived here and suffered the worst through disinvestment and we should have good things available to us without guilt. Like your music and your coffee shops. But it is to say that the tools of the Neoliberal Age toward its anti-communal goals are tricky, and we must recognize them to navigate them and beat them to the punch.

Enjoy your day. Party. And fight.

Colonialism, Private Property, and Repairs

As several commentators have recently had to address reparations while the proliferation of white, male Bernie Sanders’ supporters talk over and for other groups (“Bernie Bros”), thought it may be time to have a discussion on what reparations could look like since many seem stuck on the notion of cash payouts. First, a primer on the relationship between race, class, gender, and property.

Race is a social construct made necessary for the wealth exploitation of racism, an invention of the colonizing West dating back at least to the Spanish explorations  exploitations of the New World and the Portuguese explorations exploitations of Africa. Racism was a necessity for the wealth building that would be the foundation of capitalism and the modern world, by which most of the world is still exploited vis a vis racism.

Broken Glass by Xavier Lacot

The legacy of the United States and other Western powers, as marked by none other than Marx, in regards to black and native people is one of severe wage theft and land plunder, buoyed by state-sanctioned murder. This is not a radical or new concept to anyone familiar with US history near the margins; this is the foundation of land grabs and reservations, chattel slavery and sharecropping, Jim Crow and mass incarceration necessary for American economic and military expansion. This is the legacy of colonialism and empire brought to a head.

This theft and murder did not end 150 years ago nor 50 years ago nor – despite a slowing – will it end anytime in the foreseeable future on its own. There is a necessity to correct the evils of police brutality and mass incarceration focused on black and brown people as well as the numerous schemes* to steal the labor, wages, property, and wealth of Native and Black people. To not correct and make right is to accept the evils of racism and exploitation through the course of American blood.

In a White Supremacist Capitalist system like the United States (or the rest of the West), we cannot come to terms with classism and wage theft without antagonizing racism.

Likewise, we cannot hope to defeat racism without confronting classism.

Indeed we also cannot address these concerns separate from sexism and gender.

We cannot center these concerns on the feelings of white men. We cannot understand the gravitas of these concerns without considering how they affect the Black and Native family and the ones directly affected by it due to their weight and responsibility – the women in these communities.

Not class over race but race as a tool of class with different strata depending on ethnicity and color. Starting as early as Reconstruction, Black people were made to be the permanent underclass of the United States, partially as a means of keeping the white masses in check. Natives are in a continual genocide-erasure, as a means of continuing to claim deed over the nation’s lands.

But I’m honestly more interested at this point in how reparations can work. To me, the notion of cash payouts makes little sense. The money is there, the money is gone – this is the fate for all poor people within a status-heavy consumer capitalist society. This is why lottery winners go broke within a few years. Poor people are exploited even with our wealth.

What does make more sense is community investments.

The following loose suggestions are based in large part on years of living in highly segregated Chicago and from hearing others. So there are a few biases here – some ideas are more thought out than others (ie, I don’t know nearly as much about Native communities), but the idea is to offer suggestions and begin to get the creative juices flowing. Feel free to add, think about, take, adapt in the comments and elsewhere.

Reparations for African Americans:

• Land and property within African American communities given to those communities. This would include vacant lots, abandoned buildings, residential buildings. To be divided up according to community needs and desires.
•  Grants for businesses within black communities, including lending institutions, grocers
• Influx of black-owned and operated grocers provided by funds
• Land and water set aside for urban farming purposes
• Part ownership of all US-based banks, universities, and other institutions that profited heavily from slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, housing theft on the backs of Black labor and violence.

Reparations for Natives:

• Full sovereignty of lands
• Minority stake/ownership claims in all US corporations
• Taking down of all Indian Mascotry in sports
• Business and community investments

Reparations for Women:

• Universal, unquestioned access to reproductive rights
• Universal childcare
• Comprehensive and age-appropriate sexual and gender justice training throughout schooling
• Comprehensive domestic violence and abuse prevention training and resources
• Laws protecting against gender wage disparity

Primarily though, the work of reparations is to repair and thus must be both of liberatory and solidarity actions in steps, goals, and outcomes. I believe that public works and public goods programs will lift all working class and middle class families, but proportionately the above. Minimum basic income would raise all out of poverty (with the exception of undocumented citizens at present rate of national conversation. Something else will need to be in place for their protections), but particularly for women and people of color as well as poor white people. Universal childcare will mostly positively affect mothers, but other parents as well.

It’s I think important to note that these gender and racial thefts are components of a wider scale plan and system against the overwhelming majority of people in both the United States and in the world. Oxfam recently released a study showing that the world’s 69 richest people hold as much wealth as half the people in the world – that’s 3,500,000,000 people who collectively have as little scrape together as less than 70 people. And the wealth of those top 69 people has only increased in the last five years – by 42% – while the wealth of the lower 3.5 billion fell 41%. In 2015, for the first time, 1% of the world’s population owns more assets than the other 99%.

So the problem is widespread, but by reducing racism and sexism and making repairs to those who’ve been harmed by it, we can open up the doors for all to benefit.

 

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*Pay day and car title loans, check cashing stations, preventative childcare costs, prepaid phones, redlining, rent rates, gentrification, policing fees, cash bail – all unfairly and unduly targeting the black working class.

16 Things to Look Forward to in 2016, Chicago

Vigil for Bettie Jones last weekend. Jones was a Chicago grandmother shot by police for answering the door during domestic dispute as cops were shooting through her to 21 year old with a bat.

1. Rahm Emanuel’s resignation. And not just for the Laquann McDonald cover-up but for hosts of things, some of which will be covered here.
2. Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez getting booted from office. She was part of the cover-up as well and has been extremely pro-police and pro-incarceration in ways that rival Daley and Giulliani’s pre-mayoral runs as SA’s. I wouldn’t be surprised if she also was planning on running for mayor of Chicago. You can’t use the full weight of the state’s attorney office to cover you any longer, Anita!
3. Fewer jails. Jail and jail time, with or without prison, lead to time away from work, from the community, from family. Thus they work against communities of color and lead to cycles of poverty and high-crime, particularly where
4. More restorative justice hubs. The amount of money that Cook County spends on incarceration contrasted with restorative justice – where the person who made an infraction works within the community to make amends and learn how to deal with issues that caused the problem in the first place – is beyond absurd. It is a fraction of a percent, at around $0.5 million to the jail’s $360 million and we need to at least double it the next year.
5. End cash bonds. These unfairly restrict poor people, primarily those who are charged with petty crimes. Cash bonds put undue pressure on poor people – usually black Chicagoans – and the justice system, including crowding jails and tagging innocent people with guilty pledges so that they can go home. They then have an adverse affect on poor communities of color.
6. Restore community mental health centers.
7. Abolish Broken Windows Policing.
8. Disband the current, corrupt, ineffecient, police-caping Independent Police Review Authority and make it truly independent.
9. Establish proper, completely independent (no police, no police connections) oversight of the IPRA.
10. Disarm the police. No shots. No tasers. They must learn to deescalate using actual tactics of deescalation.
11. National gun control laws that make it nearly impossible to sell large amounts of guns – which are then smuggled into urban areas like Chicago and make it likely to end up in a shooting of
12. Drastically increase violence intervention and prevention programs such as CeaseFire.
13. Reorganize the Chicago Public Schools Board. It is run by capitalists and for capitalists.
14. Fully fund publicly-controlled schools.
15. Remove Chicago police resource officers from schools.
16. Insert violence prevention programs and training for all staff at all CPS schools in order to equip students with violence reduction & prevention tools and embodied practice.

Ash Wednesday protest against police violence. Photo by Nancy Stone for the Chicago Tribune