The much-touted 'pace' of bleeding out

Let's say I'm bleeding. Badly. I have about 15 pints of blood in me. I drop a half pint and I don't like that exactly, but it's really no sweat. Then I lose another pint. I feel a little dizzy, starting to get concerned. Then a pint and a half. Weak, feeling sick. Another pint. Really worried now...

Then the 'pace slows'' to half a pint. Do I feel better? Not much. I'm in deep doo-doo, as a certain former President would say. I'm losing less blood than I was before per minute, sure, but my problem is still getting worse. Much worse - fast. Why? You don't have to be a surgeon of any stripe to figure this one out. Because the first drops of blood lost are not the same as the later drops. The more blood I lose, the more precious each drop becomes - the less able I am to weather the loss, not to mention recover from it.

So it is with the slower pace of job loss announced this week for April (only 539,000 losses - nonfarm). The more jobs the economy hemorrhages, the harder it is for laid-off workers to find work - and the harder it is for families to support one another as charities and social services become overwhelmed.

Of course, these are probably not the final figures anyway. (March figures were just "revised upward" to 699,000 people kicked out of work. 650,000 had been predicted.)

And once again, these official figures use "unemployment" as a technical term, which does not mean how many people are out of work. That number would be about twice as much, even centrist economists admit. Official unemployment rates - 8.9 percent this month - do not count the workers who have "become discouraged and stopped looking for work," workers who are failing to find adequate work - maybe a couple days a week when they need a full-time job, and many others. The under-employment rate could be 15-20 percent, according to some.

Of course, even that is not distributed equally. (What is?) For some age groups of black men, for example, the employment rate is barely about 50 percent now - for others, less than 15 percent.

But the economy "may be finally starting to find its footing," writes Brian Blackstone in the Wall Street Journal - even though " a good deal of the improvement came from government hiring in advance of next year's Census." Now all we have to do is convince the government to hire the 5.7 million people who hav been thrown out of work since December 2007 to count every living thing on the planet Earth ... hmmm ...

Capitalist swine manure lagoons

So now the swine flu outbreak may have an interesting link to "manure lagoons" at gigantic pig farms in Mexico on land stolen from campesinos and run by US agribusiness. There's a shocker! A big international corporation like Smithfield Farms involved in a catastrophe of Bhopal proportion?

Oh, yeah. Bhopal was a catastrophe caused by a big international corporation. So was this whole "recession". (Well, not by one.)

Smithfield Farms, by the way, has been on labor's naughty list for several years, too. The company has even become the Baby Face Nelson of union-busting, poster boy of the need for the Employee Free Choice Act:

" ...At a Smithfield Farms plant in North Carolina, the company actually formed its own police force, in cahoots with the local sheriff, to scare away the union with guns. The Wagner Act was supposed to end that kind of corporate criminality more than 70 years ago, but it is still happening today. ..."

And speaking of the recession, how does Smithfield Farms coming out smelling before this swine flu thing? (You can probably guess the apropriate simile from the first line of this post.)

" ...Workers soon to be let go from Farmland Foods have learned there will be no severance money to go with them.
Smithfield Farms Inc. announced in February it was closing the New Riegel plant April 17, along with five other plants around the country in a reorganization effort.

"...Some of [the workers] have been there for more than 30 years. They came to us two months ago and told us they were going to close the facility as well as four or five other plants owned by Smithfield.

"...At this point, he said they are not really bargaining with Smithfield, they are begging.

"...They [Smithfield] agree that they are making money ... They just won't pay a severance package. It's really a slap in the face to the people who made their livelihood there for better than 30 years."

Nice, huh?

More on "tea parties"

Yes, it's a pun.

Sorry, my basic critique of this "tax day tea party" embarrassment is below, but I just couldn't resist these -er- insightful comments from the Illinois "tea party" site, which I think show their true colors:

"I stand for preserving the American way. I am against this socialistic regime the uninformed have elected. I’ll be there with others!"

"[...] liberals are projecting a very rabid socialist agenda."

And when one lone voice chimed in to criticize the war, "Uh, [...] 'failed Iraq war'? Did you miss something? Like the success in Iraq? Democracy? Come on down to the tea party, be sure to wear your Obama slobbering t-shirt so we know who you are … maybe by April 15 you’ll come to your senses when you see how (N)Obama is rapidly destroying our country."

"I will be there will bells on. I am so tired of what Obama is doing to this country! We need to take back our country and renew our pride in being a true American."

"I am in P-Town also Carol and Bobbie, and if we can get an April 15th Tax Tea Party here in the land of Obamunism Central, I can be there. Of course, I also view April 15th as National Buy A Gun Day, so it might have to happen after Pekin Gun Store opens."

"Operation Support Our Troops organization will be there and is requesting perhaps a donation to bring since their inventory is low for the troops. Come with American Flags and signs - enough is enough! Get our country back! Help us with this 2009 American Revolution - stand strong, stand united and let us make history!"

"No more government funding of a 'bridge to nowhere', no more providing non-essential medical care for illegals, no more research grants 'to study the Kentucky toad' (see Stimulus bill), or public funding of 'artists', No more public financing of insurance for those that CHOOSE to live in high casualty risk areas, like beach front property."

I want to be clear that criticism or anger directed at Obama is not necessarily racist - there's a lot to gripe about, including how the economy is being managed and on whose behalf - but in this context of jingoistic "Ameristan" comments emphasizing the middle name "Hussein" and so on, I think there is good reason to see racism at work.

That's not all that's wrong, of course. Take the photo of a Texas woman proclaiming, "I'm a proud right-wing extremist." Or the anti-welfare "distribute my work ethic" or "free markets not free loaders".

This could go on all day, but maybe in closing we can pause to ponder the sly, "Don't tax me, bro."

Big little banks

Today's New York Times has a worried article about the government's assessments of the nation's biggest banks, and how lower assessments might send investors packing from the "smaller" ones. Es posible.

But the scale is all wrong for this discussion, or at least it's not to our scale for most of us. The big little banks or the big big banks, any and all of them are ready, willing and able to sack our communities like a thirsty horde of Vikings.

What would help us is to break them all up into local or regional banks, reorganized along cooperative lines - one member-depositor, one vote - and a mission to support local sustainable economies.

Missing the Boat

Seems the Libertarian nutjobs are coming out of the woodwork, holding little "tea parties" here and there. But these so-called tea parties have just about one and a half things in common with the original in Boston, besides the name, that is.

First, they are disguised. In 1773 the famous tea party-istas were disguised as Native Americans. In 2009 the cheap knock-offs are disguised as patriots who are standing up for the common people.

In 1773 of course the issue was "taxation without representation". The British colonies in North America had no elected representation in the British Parliament, though some of them did have influence via money. The American Revolution was a mixed bag, led by wealthy landowners - most involved in slavery - and by common craftsmen and idealists who believed in Thomas Paine's quite radical "Rights of Man."

These 21st century tea-party-goers have the principle just about reversed. They reject the basic principle established in the English wars of parliament versus king, carried on in the American rebellion, that the power to tax derives directly from the democratic process, and - I'd argue - that its primary purpose is to "promote the general welfare."

So, taxes would be the second thing this year's tea parties have in common with the 1773 party, except that it's similar in name only. That's why I say one and a half things in commmon.

There is certainly plenty of wastage of tax money, always has been. Business-obsessed and war-mongering public officials put our tax money to the worst possible uses: aggressive wars, subsidies to the biggest and most destructive corporations, tax breaks to the rich, deregulating industry, privatizing public services (yes, these activities cost tax money).

On the other hand, taxes pay for schools, libraries, streets, sanitation (in many places), public health, fire departments, adult education programs, and other things that clearly "promote the general welfare". Social security, disability, and child and family welfare programs are excellent uses of tax money. We could use twice as many teachers, and a lot more expenditure in most of these neglected areas. Better levees and a half-way decent evacuation plan might have saved half a million poor people's homes in 2005. Clearly a comprehensive response after the fact was missing, sidelined to the more pressing objectives of the richest 1 percent of our population.

So clearly taxes are not the problem, per se. The problem is a two-parter: how we spend taxes, and how we collect tax. Taxes are not too high, in fact; they are too low - on the rich. Sure, they're too high on most of us - sales taxes, property taxes, gas taxes, all regressive (they hit you harder, the lower your income). This is not a wonkish detail; it's the very heart of the issue. Libertarians (emphasis on the capital 'L') who gloss over this crucial reality are either clueless or faking, at the deepest level.

A lot of coded racism plays into this nowadays, too: anti-welfare "queen" ideology a la Ronnie "Rayguns" Reagan, etc. On a very important institutional level this is a familiar "divide and conquer" politics of the sort that allowed the English to conquer the Native Americans, India, and so on, and still keeps the American people under the thumb of its wealthy. It distracts our righteous popular anger over the repeated bail-outs of the rich and deepening neglect of most of us - away from the authentic popular pressure that is striving heroically in the opposite direction: toward a "people's bailout" and what some are calling equity.

The People's Potluck

Last summer a solid union friend of mine named Gene Vanderport got together some people he knew to talk about ways that communities could address the economic crisis.

This was well before the financial sector locked up and job losses really spiked in October and November. Of course the economists-that-be now admit that the recession started last year (at least), but at that time they had not admitted anything. What Paul Krugman tells us is a "liquidity crisis" some of us - including Gene's members - were already experiencing as a big fat "cash flow" problem, a housing problem, a job problem, a wages and benefits and paying-the-bills sort of problem. Of course it means the same thing.

The idea hatched at Gene's house was to hold a "People's Thanksgiving" just before the holiday of a similar name, and bring together activists and service providers from across the community with people who need food and housing and jobs, and put our heads together and see how we could help one another. The assumption was that we cannot rely on the government, certainly not on capitalism, to rescue our communities.

It was prescient.

The first potluck supper, which actually happened the weekend after Thanksgiving, turned into regularly monthly get-togethers - and spun off working subgroups focused on various aspects of the problem, and built ties to other local movements with potential for what my old hippy editor at the Buffalo Alternative Press used to call synergy: housing, food, jobs, union rights, health care, veterans' benefits and war, urban justice and racism, immigration and migrant farm work in the area.

One group is planning community gardens and teach-ins on container gardening, cooking on a low budget, canning what you grow, working with food pantries, etc. The Catholic Worker in town is involved and already fighting evictions in a nearby town, presenting ideas on how to put "stimulus money" to good use. A couple groups are collaborating on compiling a directory of services, discussing ways to fill the void left by our town's sudden loss of its Urban League, which had provided so many services and referrals.

Homeless participants are taking an active and integral role. Felons are telling their stories. Unionists and Greens and tenants' union advocates are working together, talking about nationalizing banks, collecting clothes for abused women and children, eating together and talking and sharing ideas on a "People's Bailout" or "Social Monetary Fund" and demands to make on elected officials as well as direct actions and organizing for mutual aid.

At first we talked about building towards a "Central Illinois Social Forum" in May. Now that event promises to bring in such new energy, so many exciting new ideas and connections, such excellent new community, that it will ikely be just the beginning.

I recommend the model. Highly.

Outrage is not enough!

Maybe you've heard the phrase, "Outrage is all the rage," describing how ticked off the American people are about the toxic economy and our feckless government. Quite right, too. Of course, we aren't pissed off enough until we're pissed off enough to do something about it.

It's not bad enough that the bastards who've been lowering wages and shipping jobs overseas for 30 years, all the time claiming - with economists as Greek chorus - that big business "knows best" so we should just lie back and let them run things, are the ones we're bailing out now.

It's not bad enough that they've stolen billions from us over the years by underpaying us for our work, and then shifting the tax burden to ordinary working folks away from the richest people in the frakking world, and now they come to us for help!

No, it's not bad enough that the chief instrument of our international economic policy (besides the military), the International Monetary Fund, has been extorting "reforms" in other countries when their economies are in trouble that our economic managers refuse to accept here - like nationalizing the banks. (By the way, most of the usual IMF demands - like privatization and cutting social services - are about the opposite of what just about any country needs.)

But the bloodsuckers like AIG used our money to give millions in bonuses? Let us get our hands on them! Or at the very least on the money.

On "Talk of the Nation" invited pundit Marc Ambinder tells us Congress allowed the AIG bonuses because of some "sense of the sanctity of contracts"- which the host rightly points out wasn't their take on UAW contracts.

But to ask whether it's "fair" to tax the money back, as another pundit on NPR did, that's not even funny. Is it "fair" that we - and future generations burdened by the debt - should pay for this monstrous ripoff? Absolutely not.

And to say, as NPR's select pundits did last night, that "the average American" just "doesn't understand" the complexities involved! It's enough to start riots, or ought to be.

But neither taxing, nor rioting is going to be enough. And in the long run, neither is nationalizing the banks and other companies. Yes, we should tax them, and yes, we should riot. And yes, we should nationalize them - and then clean the bums out, and then reorganize them completely: break them up, divide the assets among not just a half-dozen regions of the country but dozens of smaller, not-for-profit co-ops - and re-regulate (properly this time), and take the shackles off the credit unions, let them grow and compete with the for-profit entities, let them flourish unencumbered by the monopolizing lobbyist-inspired political thumb of corporate banking.

It's a decent formula for the rest of the economy, too: bailouts are, or should be, in-roads to government buyouts, yes, takeovers, housecleaning and reorganization on populist social principles: massive break-ups and reorganizations into worker-owned co-operative businesses in every sector of the economy impacted by the current cancer.

Because the problem isn't just mismanagement. It isn't just deregulation. The banks and mortgage companies, credit card companies, car loan financing schemers, etc., lent to everyone who could realistically afford their rates. Then they lent to a whole class of people who couldn't really afford the usury, and the rest is history why? Greed? No, not even close. Greed was there, of course. But the competitive drive to maximize profits, and control markets, demanded it. They had to expand or lose.

And they will have to again, even if the private clowns who run them now are replaced by the government clowns who deregulated them in the first place, and their newer apprentices - no, nationalization is far from enough. The reorganization we require must be carried out on a completely different agenda than the one our government has been working off, a people's agenda. A Social Monetary Fund agenda, if you ask me.

That's the short term solution at least.

Salvadoran people win!

Congratulations to the poor people of El Salvador on their recent election defeat of the evil rightwing ARENA that held power for so long. Bizarrely enough the new US Administration is welcoming the FMLN government, quite a change from the millions of US dollars that that used to pour into the country to try to crush them.

It remains to be seen what the FMLN will mean to the brave people of El Salvador, as varieties of Bolivarian socialism or other left-populist movements win elections - and re-elections! - in one Latin American government after another in the "new world order" of only one superpower, and that one in economic crisis - at the center of a world economic crisis.

Some of the signs between San Salvador and Washington might suggest a danger of cooptation.

On the other hand there have been encouraging efforts among the new left governments of Latin America to cement their own bonds of solidarity, including welcoming Cuba back into the fold (there's a can of worms in and of itself!) and support for Bolivian President Evo Morales in last year's showdown with the US.

Same Song, Different Day

Can you name the song?

Here's another observation similar to mine about Texas below, this one from the University of Mississippi, where I went to school - and used to write about "Neo-Confederates" in the student paper once upon a time.

Atkins is absolutely on the money that, "The recent spectacle of Corker, Shelby and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky leading the GOP attack on the proposed $14 billion loan to the domestic auto industry -- with 11 other Southern senators marching dutifully behind -- made it crystal clear. The heart of Southern conservatism is the preservation of a status quo that serves elite interests."

And, "Expect these same senators and their colleagues in the U.S. House to wage a similar war in the coming months against the proposed Employee Free Choice Act authorizing so-called "card check" union elections nationwide."

These guys are completely unreconstructed in essence. I remember a study a friend of mine at Mississippi did of proposals for economic development in the Delta region: the big land-owners opposed it, even though they themselves would have profited as much as - actually much more than - the sharecroppers and reserve army of the barely employed. Why? Because it would have brought increased social mobility for the local downtrodden, who might begin to entertain some crazy notions of going to school or running off to Memphis, or Chicago... or just that there might be other options for them than modern serfdom.Excellent point.

And to wit, Atkins says, "In their zeal to destroy unions and their hard-fought wage-and-benefits packages, the Southern senators could not care less that workers in their home states are among the lowest paid in the nation. Ever wonder why the South remains the nation's poorest region despite generations of seniority-laden senators and representatives in Congress?

"Why weren't these same senators protesting the high salaries in the financial sector when the Congress approved the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street? Why pick on blue-collar workers at the Big Three who last year agreed to huge concessions expected to save the companies an estimated $4 billion a year by 2010? These concessions have already helped lower union wages to non-union levels at some auto plants."

Excellent point - that only a commie pinko would make - like his others. Keep an eye on these clowns in the Southern caucus, they're up to serious skulduggery.

Texas secedes again

Fifth time's a charm?

In 1822 a bunch of white Americans from the Southeast, proto-Texans, left the US and crossed the Mississippi River and essentially re-introduced the institution of slavery into northern Mexico. In 1829 Mexico outlawed slavery, but gave the white slavers in the state of Coahuila y Tejas special dispensation until 1830. (The abolition movement was growing around the world, and slavery was abolished in the French Revolution - although Napoleon brought it back briefly - was outlawed in the British Empire in 1833, and so on.) Against this worldwide trend, early Texans seceded from Mexico in the so-called "Texas Revolution" (more accurately a Reaction) in 1835-6. Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and Sam Houston are still revered in the US as heroes of that war for slavery.

The American ex-pats of the Texan Republic soon joined the US - no shocker there - but a generation later left the US again in 1861. It was over slavery again (which wasn't strictly under threat in the US at the time, but slave states felt challenged by the election of Abe Lincoln, a moderate in that he opposed expansion of slavery - the slavers' bluff had been called, essentially).

After the war, black and Latino Texans faced regular atrocities from the Ku Klux Klan and the revered Texas Rangers (not much like the Lone Ranger), as well as Jim Crow laws and so on. In 1954 when Brown v. Board of Education banned racial segregation in public schools, the governor called out the Rangers to impede black students. Racist resistance continued through the 1970s - a kind of running secession from the trend toward civil rights and equality that was sweeping the world. "White flight" from cities in Texas - as elsewhere - represents one facet of this subtler, but no less racist neo-secession.

There's a connection here to anti-immigration movements, like the Minute Men (a kind of continuum between US Border Patrol and American Nazis - but that's for another time.

Now yesterday, with the recession growing and the threat of federal "expansion" of officially-defined unemployed (most people who aren't working don't count, rather conveniently) Texas governor Rick Perry turned down $555 million to bailout the state's sinking unemployment fund - which the state's own Workforce Commission chair says could be in the red in seven months.

"During these tough times," he says, "Texas employers are working harder than ever..." blah, blah, blah (my emphasis). What about Texas workers, being canned by the hundreds of thousands every week?

Perry's not alone, of course, which is what suggests there's a new wave of genuine neo-secessionism in the birthing here.