all for now

Yes, i’m neglectful. I will return to this blog on day…but i’m still waiting for the inspiration to strike me.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this headdesker.

While looking for jobs, I found an “opportunity” with a major community health initiative as a recruiter/organizer. Looked promising, until the two following details emerged.

1. The pay was under 15 an hour. This alone is not fatal.
2. Health benefits did not start for a half year. This is.

Tell me how a community health initiative gets away without insuring it’s own workers? Working poverty is wrong, period. This nation won’t be right until there’s universal health care and a living wage.

 

who pays for it

Vanessa points me to some fauxgressive posturing, and the question of “who pays for” the children of the poor.

Last time I checked, working poverty is an externality. The true cost of the labor and life of these workers is not reflected in their pay. We all pay the difference. The worker pays most directly, with loss of opportunities and recompense. Probably at the expense of their health as well.

The state, and the rest of us, pay in a variety of ways. Perhaps direct assistance, food stamps, etc. More likely we pay in lost payroll taxes, healthcare costs shifted to the state, and unrealized economic gains related to working class spending…a primary driver of local economies.

All so that the company who hires such a person can do so below the cost of what it really costs to have that work done. A profit, which isn’t even a zero-sum gain. For every dollar the company pockets, we don’t just lose that dollar. We lose all the productivity, labor, and gain that might have come if the worker had been paid fairly, been able to spend those wages, or invest them.

Who do we expect pays for this?

The worker. Us.

It’s that simple, really. Poverty wages are a neat way of saying “theft.”

-sly

 

well, that was an easy target

The beeb reports today that researchers have found the problem for why oil is expensive and food is scarce.

No, it’s not global capitolism run amok. Or even bio-fuel schemes that reap huge profits for agri-business.

It’s fatties.

My shorter reaction.

Fuck you!

My longer reaction.

Health is not just a weight issue, or even primarily so. Health is a race issue, a class issue, and a deliberate choice about the way we decided to build cities. Let’s talk about these things…let’s talk about the way the greens and the fruits at the bodega are still expensive but hardly fresh, let’s talk about how superfund sites just happen to concentrate in poor areas, let’s talk about the highways that paved over livable neighborhoods, and how these places still don’t have green space, made dangerous by a lethal cocktail of poverty and neglect.

And then…

Only then…

Will such “researchers” learn that what they do is worthless self-promotion.

-sly

 

play

He wasn’t supposed to be there. I don’t recall exactly why. If I think about it hard enough, his stop should have been a mile back. The bus was nearing my house, and I was at least slightly concerned.

He wanted our attention so badly. He was a bully, a clown. He was also capable of being very mean. I think he was held back, or at least he was large for his age. I was small.

5th percentile small. Off the charts small. They actually drew my line in the margins when I went to the doctor.

I don’t recall exactly how it began, or why. All I know is that I recall being very scared as he moved around, hoping that I would be safe. He sat down next to me.

…

He sat down next to five of us, boys and girls alike, all in turn. In the third grade, I wasn’t entirely sure what had happened. We were bundled up like snowmen, but the intent was unmistakable. Possessive, hostile, hurtful.

We got off the bus, but he still wanted to play. He called after us. We ran to our parents.

We spent the next day in very serious tones, talking to the adults. I think we all cried.

In many ways, we were lucky. He was already a problem child, we were the good kids. Our parents held clout, and there was no doubt what would happen once we told. All together, we were believed.

We shouldn’t have been lucky. Luck, privilege, should have nothing to do with being believed as a survivor of sexual assault. The right thing to do is not a scarce good to be doled out to the “right” victims, and withheld from the bad. Nobody deserves to be hurt like that, everyone deserves compassionate response after trauma.

I say this mostly because of what I have learned with age. A 3rd grader does not accidentally sit down next to fellow children on a bus and violate them. This is learned behavior. I didn’t see him for years…and while he still struck terror into me every time I saw him, it was accompanied by a growing and sickly sense of compassion.

One that did not forget my pain. One that did not demand anything. But one that told me that whatever he had done to us, had been sown in his life tenfold. I pass his house sometimes, small and rundown. I pray that he has healed. I pray that the evil done in that place might somehow be undone.

-sly

 

We are in Jena

Get the banner here
Sign the petition
Join the letter writing campaign

Today, a small town is being filled with witnesses who are there in body and spirit to see and to say the truth.

I cannot be there in person, but I feel the need to remind myself that the world of Jena is the same world that I inhabit.

Jena is not a southern thing. It is not a small town thing. It is not an accident. It is not an aberration. It is not anything other than the status quo, the enactment of racism through law.

Mychal Bell is one more in a long line of black men who have been sacrificed to our sense of law and order, caught up by a system of gesture, code, and power that enforces apartheid. From the Scottsboro boys, to Amadou Diallo, to Rodney King, to criminalization of poverty and addiction…

We are living in such world as Jena, where the codes are as strict as they are unwritten.

We must free the Jena Six.

Justice, and only justice.

-sly

 

Why I Loathe HRC

No, not the HRC. The other one.

It came to my attention, talking with a fellow politico the other day, that I probably am in possession of a rather irrational dislike of one Hillary R. Clinton. I bickered for a good while with my friend as to whether or not the Hill was deserving of funds from her organization.

Right wing turns on immigration.

Suggestions of the abolition of abortion.*

Poisoned “support” of queer communities that panders to the sellouts.

A history of support of unchecked free-capitol trade.**

Then again, as I have repeated many a time in the last months: There is not a single acceptable candidate for the Democratic nomination in the race.

Not a single one.

Every contender is to my eyes, fatally flawed with compromised positions, status quo preserving double talk, and sheer un-electability. I do question my particular vehimence against Shillary, and I tend to think that it may be rooted in my growing feeling of betrayal by the Clintonian politics of my youth. For some time, I had seen Bill as heroically liberal, only to grow in understanding that he’d been anything but. The suggestion that he’d told Kerry to support the FMAs came as a final straw, obliterating any residual good will.

The problem, I have come to understand, is that most of my fellow Americans are damned idiots, and get precisely the government that they deserve. Sadly, we have yet to find a way to contain the misery produced by such poor judgment onto those most responsible.

-sly

*This is why “safe, legal, rare” is not an acceptable tagline for a progressive. You start talking like this, and you reinforce the perception that those who engage their choice to terminate a pregnancy are either victims or moral weaklings. Holistic family planning is a good. Surrendering to the moral outlook of the forced natalist crowd is not.

** As distinguished from a system in which labor is equally liquid.

 

An Illegitimate Monopoly of Violence

To borrow the Weberian phrase…

If you haven’t seen it already…go see BFP’s “state brutality is not an anomaly.” It’s spot on.

I’ve talked about distrust of the state before, in terms of a queer/trans politic, and it’s stuff like this that makes it so important. The question is not what particularly happened there, though those details are important. The question is how does modern American life depend on a police system designed to inculcate obedience through terror? How does the political/social/legal creation of an underclass serve the needs of the privileged few?

A few excerpts from The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America by Mark Lewis Taylor on the theology of state violence:

The phrase the executed God reminds us that the God who was bound up with the life of Jesus of Nazareth was exposed to material conditions so malignant that he was executed. Jesus did not die accidentally.

Her blunt words speak more truth than perhaps she knew…”Without Rikers, the attractive lives some us lead in the nice sections of New York would not be possible.”

The spread of more vigorous and extensive police forces is a key example. The forces know how to wield technology and drama to control neighborhoods….The very spectacle of forces, the entrancing and awesome show, helped create acceptance of repressive paramilitary tactics.

Police, and the prison-industrial complex which they serve have become tools of terror. If we are comfortable, it is because we have told ourselves that we exist on the right side of the law. But when the law is lawless, there is no safety…and we has chased after an idol.

May we seek the mercy of the Jesus of the prisoners, the persecuted, the rebels, the campesinos, the migrants, and the alien.

-sly

 

Martin

This hangs over my desk, and is a reminder to me of the particular call of a radical Christian witness in the face of racial and colonial violence.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

…This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

…our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin…we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

…We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message — of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

Excerpted from “A Time to Break The Silence.”

For the memory of the faithful departed,

-sc

 

It isn't so much the long term…

But what happens right there.

BFP has been covering this since forever, so I’m going to send you there for the substance. But today is the International Day of Solidarity for Oaxaca. The people there are locked in a struggle to oust the corrupt and brutal governor, Ulises Ruiz. An open letter to the Federal troops occupying the city…

To members of the Federal Preventative Police:

You all are so young, and remind me so much of my children in your age, you color, your features, that if it were another place, in other circumstances, I wouldn’t have any problem approaching you to give you a hug and to comfort you with maternal love, now that you are so far from home, from mom and dad, from your wives and children, in a foreign place. I know how you feel, because a mother always feels for her children, and my children, like all of you, for days, weeks even, have been away from home. “We’re fine, maybe we’ll be by tomorrow”…they say and hang up, or they send little messages that I don’t understand because they write so strangely…I’m sure that you all could be friends: you are all the same age, you have the same features, the same stature, and you all work cell phones so well…

But no, it’s not possible. “My children and I are on this side because we are pueblo, and we are with the pueblo because our morals impel us, and the conditions that we live in demand it of us. On the contrary, you all are with the government of the rich, with the tyranny of the powerful, and you all are their army even though you all, and your children and your wives and your parents are, like us, pueblo.”

If I could take all of your clothes off, if I could take away your clubs, weapons, shells, defenses, and that gray uniform, so ugly, and leave you all as God brought you into this world; with your mestizo skin and black hair, and the marks on your body from malnutrition, and from trying to make a living, trying to eat, you would all realize how similar you are to my children, who have the same lesions that misery has tattooed on their dark skin, that perhaps you all could let yourselves think that you are on the wrong side, fighting against your own, against your equals. And all just to maintain a system that spreads inequality, that makes the rich richer, while it kills the poor with hunger, or hires them at poverty wages to kill those who remain dignified and refuse to die of hunger.

In that aspect you all are so different from my children that it makes me happy. They left their houses to defend their people, their pueblo; you all left yours to defend those in power that violate the pueblo. They left their school uniforms to go and defend the barricades; you all have left yours to try and lift those barricades. They are out from liberty of conviction; you all for this monstrous job? They are fighting for a brighter future, for a democratic, just, fraternal and equal society; on the contrary, you all beat people in order to put bread on the table of your own, bread that is stained with blood. My children are in the street defending their life, armed with reason, their morals, and resourcefulness; you all are out there with machine guns trying to take the lives of those who are defending life itself, profaning Oaxacan ground, without reason, because there isn’t one, and without honor because you all don’t have any.

I haven’t seen my children for days, but I know they are all right; I know that there are other mothers going to the barricades to give them food to eat, and the hug that I can’t give them because I have to work to support the youngest ones; I know there are medics to help them if something happens; I know that they have friends to help them through difficult moments, when the mercenaries pass and shoot at them, and they see death so close; I know that they have their girlfriends at their sides, fighting shoulder to shoulder in the battle, as the equals that they are; I know that when they want to assault them, the neighbors come out to help out; I know that my children are children of the pueblo and that their pueblo are there brothers and sisters, and their mothers, wives and children. It has been days since I have seen my children, but I know that they are all right because they are on the right side, doing what is right, and I feel very proud of them, my children, the thousands of children that were born for me in the early morning hours of June 14th.

I hope that some day your mothers can say the same that I am now saying of my children: that they are proud of you all because you have decided to leave the uniform behind so that your future won’t be as gray as those that you now wear; that the bread that you decide to bring to the table be a product of your own sweat, not of the spilled blood of the workers; that your time in Oaxacan lands be a product of a hospitable visit, not a result of a military operation in disguise, lacking in legality and legitimacy, treasonous and malicious. I feel bad for you and for your mothers, the strange enemies that you have resolved to confront, and to profane my land, my earth, with your boots and your tanks, without ever being able to imagine that the God that never dies gave me an activist in each child. I am sure that we will overcome, that we will triumph, that we will construct a better world for our children and even for yours! That will be our revenge….

Attentively,

The brave and dignified women of Oaxaca

The why you should care is not that globalized labor means that the oppression of people in Mexico can have a direct and negative pressure on American wages, though it can. And it’s not that the Bush administration may get ideas from Fox on how to deal with domestic dissent, though he might.

The why is what happens right now. For Oaxaca, and for you. In the face of such violence, you only have a couple of choices. You can deny that it’s really happening. You can do something about it. You can deny that it’s important.

Guess which one we usually pick here in the States? Not everybody is going to be in a position to do everything, everytime. But there is a violence that you are close to, one that affects you, one that you see, one that you may have the power to interrupt. Speak up, and tell the powers that be, that from this day forth, you will have no part in the shedding of innocent blood.

The attack that our brothers, the people of Oaxaca suffered and suffer cannot be ignored by those who fight for freedom, justice and democracy in all corners of the planet.

This is why, the EZLN calls on all honest people, in Mexico and the world, to initiate, starting now, continual actions of solidarity and support to the Oaxacan people, with the following demands:

For the living reappearance of the disappeared, for the freedom of the detained, for the exit of Ulises Ruiz and the federal forces from Oaxaca, for the punishment of those guilty of torture, rape and murder.

We call to those in this international campaign to tell, in all forms and in all places possible, what has occurred and what is occurring in Oaxaca, everyone in their way, time and place…

Subcomandante Marcos

Note Marcos’ language. All honest people are called to this, because the truth of the world is that evil is happening. Honesty is not a private virtue, my friends.

This isn’t about the long term. This is about what happens right now.

-sly

 

Having Slept Through All of Yesterday

Really, this mono thing bites.

Two articles managed to be side by side in my feed reader today, and I think they have some illumination to offer each other. The first was Shake’s Sis, writing about the expanding phenomenon on suburban poverty, where rising heating and transportation costs are being felt acutely. A sober reminder that American wealth disparity is on the frightening rise.

Paul Butler, writing at Black Prof, offers a story on a study of encouragement given to children as a function of parental education/income. While the study did not specifically look at race, he moves to those questions on account of income/education disparities.

The original article from the NYT reads

By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Hart and Risley found that as the number of words a child heard increased, the complexity of that language increased as well. As conversation moved beyond simple instructions, it blossomed into discussions of the past and future, of feelings, of abstractions, of the way one thing causes another — all of which stimulated intellectual development.

The quote that moves me to post the link is his answer to his co-blogger Spencer Overton, who earlier in the week discussed the capacity for self-criticism in Black communities to become toxic, asking where harm can be said to have begun. Butler responds sparingly.

“At age 3.”

That resonates with me, but I immediately want to throw up a caution, to move this very much away from mother-shaming or the like.* A while back, BFP wrote what may well be the definitive blog entry on raising a child in poverty and the hostile gaze of the state/society. My response at the time, is here…

Raising children outside of the system of stress, harassment, and economic pressure that bfp narrates is a privilege. This is not about an ontology of parenting in poverty, but a description of the after-effects of a domination system. If parents are telling their children that they aren’t good enough…the first place to look is what conditions and messages we have surrounded those families with in the first place.

-sly

*I specify here because the study in question explicitly addresses single motherhood.