The Invisible Hand that Rocks the Cradle

What is a "Free Country?" In America that sort of depends on who you ask. According to Reagan-wannabe conservatives like Fred Thompson, a free country is a country that is "based upon the value of a market economy, and free people doing free things in a free society, unafraid to trade with their neighbors... based upon the notion that we don't tax and regulate our people to death." America isn't about "dividing up the pie and rich vs. poor and boss vs. employee and all that kinda stuff," it's about working together as members of one nation, "making the pie bigger and going out there and enjoying a free country."

There's no such thing as social class, we're all just Americans. The Invisible Hand sets all the tables, a rising tide raises all ships... that, the Reagan Economists tell us, is how American works. The Adam Smiths and Milton Friedmans of the world are always there to remind us how competition keeps prices low and values up, how private industry is the most creative and efficient force for progress in any society. They remind us that there's no such thing as "class struggle;" that America owes as much to its industrial elites as it does to the working class. After all, without the highly educated and skilled elites, there'd be no innovation, and without the working class, that innovation wouldn't get anywhere. It's all a symbiotic relationship: the investor class opens a factory and the working class... well, works. That's why the "private sector"--euphemism for the capitalist "Invisible Hand"--should take over for cumbersome government bureaucracies, because a strong economy requires a free and unregulated market. A strong economy means a rich country, and when the country gets rich, everyone wins.

Bullocks. That'll slide with the New England Yacht Club and the West Coast Yuppie Convention. Hell, it might even slide with the rags-to-riches self-hatred crowd. Most commonly it'll appeal to anyone who believes--or wants to believe--that nothing that happens to anyone in this world is anyone else's fault. But the majority of us who have actually lived in America's basement and seen the machinery the makes this country run know better, even if we can't fully explain why. Experience gives lie to the claim that the "free market" produces greater prosperity for everyone, or the mythology of individualism that drives most conservatives almost to the point of denying the existence of society in favor of "six billion sovereign souls."

The key thing to understand about economists (especially the Reagan-Bush variety) is that they believe that every man woman and child on Earth is, fundamentally, some sort of economic entity. Therefore, so the theory goes, if the economy is stronger, more money is being exchanged, and more economic activity means more benefits for all these little economic entities within the economy. Sounds good at face value, except that it has one really important flaw: people are not economic entities. People are social entities, and the economy--in any form--is one of the means of social interaction and exchange. Not all exchanges are economic in nature, and in fact some of the most important ones--in terms of familiar, emotional and spiritual relationships--have no economic value of any kind. More importantly, it means that what happens in society, or even small parts of society, can directly affect other members of that society in ways they are otherwise unable to control. An "economic entity" is theoretically limited only by its liabilities and should be able to perform according to its assets; there's no reason to assume that such failure to perform could have any other causes, like, say, discrimination or lack of opportunity. I mean, if some company refuses to hire you, it's not discrimination, it's because as an economic entity you have failed to adequately represent yourself as an asset in the competitive job market (easily fixed, it turns out: just check the box on the job application that says "Hispanic").

This misunderstanding is small, but in terms of the nature of capitalism it has one devastating consequence. You see, in capitalism, the purpose of economic entities in the Free Market is to make profit. Anything an entity does to help it make profit is termed "productivity" and anything it does that is unprofitable is "waste." The entity that is most productive--that turns the biggest profits overall--is the most successful, and has better access to new markets and commodities it can exploit in order to make more profit. In this system, all of these little entities are in direct competition, so the ones that are less productive are at risk of being squeezed out altogether by the ones who are not. Basically, the most productive entity is expected to be the most innovative, or the most efficient, or the most productive, or the most whatever.

It's not actually that different from the economic system used by, say, a pack of wolves or flesh-eating bacteria. It would work extremely well in a country inhabitted mostly by pack mules who had nothing better to do than work, eat and sleep. But humans live in societies, not barns, and "survival of the fittest" is not exactly a time-honored moral virtue. Nearly every one of the world's major religions and cultures has at least one moral concept in common: reciprocity, also known as "The Golden Rule that tells us that we should treat everyone else the way we want to be treated. This concept is so universal among humans because first imperative of a society is to protect itself and all of its members; each person individually devotes his or her resources when needed to help one struggling member of that society, because each understands that everyone else would do the same for them. They treat other peolpe well, because they want to be treated well. Same goes for the notion of justice: treat other people badly, and you will be treated badly. Profit is not the primary goal of a functional society, stability is. And because societies--and not markets--created states, governments and institutions, we now have things called laws and standards that tell us what a stable and functional society is supposed to look like. Through trial and error, human cultures have discovered that the most stable societies are the ones that treasure reciprocity: the strong help the weak, the weak become strong, the newly-strong help the newly-weak.

On the other hand, a dysfunctional society is one that has become unstable, with huge swaths of its population being cheated out of the resources controlled by their society, with other groups profiting hugely at their expense. Under this system, reciprocity is strictly voluntary: the strong exploit the weak and only help them if it happens to be in their own best interest. That, unfortunately, is where America is currently headed: Reaganomics is what happens when "Economics" is mistaken for a science and the needs of society are reduced to a materialistic zero-sum game. In the logic of neocon-utopianism, there's no such thing as "society," except insofar as The Leader needs to have a group of Followers. Anyone whose sole purpose in life is not to make profit can be--and should be--ignored and ridiculed; after all, productivity is important for a healthy economy, and the economiy is the only thing that matters to anyone. Too bad if you're too old and frail to remain productive; you should have squirreled away your money every day of your entire life so you could afford to retire. Too bad if you want to spend extra time with your kids; you should have hired a Nanny for that, at least then somebody would be (economically) productive. Too bad if you can't compete with the competition; you should have bought an education from an accredited university. Too bad if your city gets destroyed by a Hurricane and you wind up homeless; you should have bought flood insurance and a boat. Too bad if you get sick and can't afford medical treatment; you should have bought better coverage from your insurance company (oh wait, you don't have insurance? Sucks to be you!)

In the end, Reaganomics--like most strains of conservativism--boils down to a bizarre marriage of libertarianism and penny despotism. It was fueled and conceived by complete and utter contempt for humanity and a fanatical obsession with wealth and power. And maybe the scariest thing is that most conservatives assume that everyone else in the world thinks exactly like them, except for a small but vocal lunatic fringe that bullies weak-minded fools into pretending to agree with them. Even if the opposite turns out to be the case, in every situation when they are given power, they will continue to display complete antipathy for just about everything that we--both as human beings and as Americans--have ever loved or cherished.

To the conservative, I can only concede: like many people I despise being forced to do things I don't want to do just because someone else thinks it's important. But that's the tradeoff I get for living in a society that can also mobilize its collective power to save my ass when I run into something you can't handle. Quid pro quo: you contribute to the group, then you have the right to ask the group to help you. If you can't stand the idea of having to listen to your neighbors tell you how to live your life, then you have no business having neighbors. Take your money, take your market, go live in a cave and live by your own rules. As for the rest of us, we have to live together, which means like it or not, the Haves and the Have-Mores are expected to part with a bigger share of their profits so the Have-Nots can survive. It's not because it's the law, it's not because we (the Have-Nots) deserve it, and it's not because they owe us anything in particular. It's only because, as Americans, we would do it for them if the situation were reversed.

Yew will explowd in a few minutes

Brief update on this one. It turns out I'm not the only one who heard the "threat" broadcast to American warships in the Gulf of Tonkin... er… Straights of Hormuz this weekend and immediately thought "Prank Caller." Apparently the voice on the broadcast--whose "heavily accented English" sounds closer to Mr. Burns than farsi speaker--remains unidentified, but there's good reason to believe it was sent anonymously by someone in a remote location, broadcasting on the Bridge to Bridge channel without authorization: the fact that the voice sounds completely different from the Iranians who hailed the ship earlier, the lack of background noise from what is supposed to be a speedboat on the high seas, and just the overall stupidity of hailing a warship fifty times your size with a threat. The source was probably a heckler on a tanker somewhere (maybe one of the ships that appears on the horizon in the Pentagon video?) who heard U.S. warships warn off a bunch of small boats on the Bridge channel and decide to fuck with their heads.

In other news, President Bombsalot this week has once again demonstrated his endless capacity for cognitive dissonance:

In public, President Bush has been careful to reassure Israel and other allies that he still sees Iran as a threat, while not disavowing his administration's recent National Intelligence Estimate. That NIE, made public Dec. 3, embarrassed the administration by concluding that Tehran had halted its weapons program in 2003, which seemed to undermine years of bellicose rhetoric from Bush and other senior officials about Iran's nuclear ambitions. But in private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document, said a senior administration official who accompanied Bush on his six-nation trip to the Mideast. "He told the Israelis that he can't control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE's] conclusions don't reflect his own views" about Iran's nuclear-weapons program, said the official, who would discuss intelligence matters only on the condition of anonymity.

I don't suppose this is particularly surprising seeing how "reality" has never been a particularly large component of Dubya's foreign policy. Well, for any of his policies come to think of it. What's worrisome is that although his "vision" for the world is based on menagerie of insipid fantasies, the bombs he drops on people because of those fantasies are all too real.

Maybe that radio heckler was onto something? Seems like we're basically just a few minutes away from Bush getting us all blown up.

Don't Call me Nigger

This is something I've had to get off my chest for a while. It's hard enough to be a black person in America without having to live with this, and let's face it, blackness in America can be pretty damn confusing. My problem is, with every fiber of my being, from the very bottom of my heart, I deeply hate niggers and nigger-culture. I hate this Afro-American memeplex that glorifies boisterous, ignorant, petty, hostile, small minded misogynists whose entire value structure consists of pussy, bling and greed. I hate lazy, selfish, narrow-minded good-for-nothings who complain how America is racist and unjust and then in the very same breath glorify crime and violence. And let's not split hairs here: a "nigga" is just a nigger who can't spell.

Most of all, though, I hate being compared to niggers--even implicitly--just because we happen to have the same skin color. Call me a "hater," I don't care; I hate them because they are making life miserable for me and every self-respecting black person in America.

You see, there is a fundamental difference between a nigger and a black person. This fact is seldom recognized in America, which is part of the reason why it's so damn confusing to be a black American. A "nigger" is, and always has been, a vessel that contains everything that has ever been negative and detestable about black people. When a white man calls me a nigger, he's calling me a stupid, lazy, worthless, inarticulate clown who will never amount to anything because I am genetically and fundamentally inferior to the entire human race. When a black man calls me a nigger, he's saying exactly the same thing.


You can distinguish a black person from a nigger easily enough, to paraphrase Asheru:

Black people are beautiful. Black people live lives as kings born to queens who never taught them what their reign means. Black people are learning, black people are building. Black people are finding their place at their own pace. Black people are having children, making symbolic unions with worthy women. Black people are the genitors of the dream soon to be deferred no more, the encore to our suffering from our elders' pain. Black people are destined reclaim our glory to continue our original story.

Now this distinction isn't always as clear as it should be, since many black people, myself included, occasionally loose their heads in a stressful moment and finds themselves behaving like niggers (we call this lapse of judgment a "nigger moment"). This makes it all the more confusing, because you can't always tell whether a black person truly is a nigger, or if he's just having a really shitty day. Even Bobby Seale--one of the righteous black men that ever lived--had an occasional nigger moment. A lot of black people these days are teetering on the edge of becoming full blown niggers; fortunately, we have no shortage of black people who can function as a social compass, letting us know what we should be aiming for.

For example: Mutulu Olugabala and Clayton Gavin from Dead Prez are black men. Samuel Jackson is a black man, Barrack Obama is a black man. Danny Glover and Denzel Washington are black men. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Junior, Huey P. Newman, Bob Marley and Thurgood Marshall were black men. Dorothy Dandridge, Billy Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald were black women. Michelle Nichols, Diana Ross, Queen Latifah and Oprah Winfrey are black women.

It's important to note that, apart from maybe Snoop Dog and Mystical, there are few famous niggers (Colin Powell and Conodoleeza Rice are house niggers, which is a related but slightly different phenomenon). Thug, Gangsta, Playa', Pimp... all of those are just sub-classes of Nigger. Gangsta rappers and some of their fans actually internalize these ideas, live their entire lives by them, scorn and ridicule anyone who doesn't; these, too, are niggers. Of course, most rappers and some actors make their money by pretending to act like niggers for the entertainment white people and other niggers. That's called "cooning," which can sometimes be kind of entertaining as long as it's never mistaken for reality. For example, Katt Williams and (until recently) Mo'Nique built an entire career around what are essentially modernized black minstrel characters. So did Flavor Flav, for that matter, especially after MTV picked him up and decided to give him a nigger-themed reality show. And I'm still trying to figure out how the cast of Soul PLane aka "Niggers: the Motion Picture" manage to find the will to live with themselves after that cinematic abomination. What's really tricky though--and sometimes depressing--is trying to figure out which hiphop stars and actors are cooning for money, and which ones are just niggers who don't know any better.

Beyond the cesspool of commercialism that passes for "urban culture," it's a bit less complicated. Look around your school, your neighborhood, your place of business. Chances are you know a lot of niggers, more than you would prefer to know (just one is too many). But if you're very fortunate, you might know an ever greater number of black people who are not niggers. Maybe you know a lot of black people who are honest, who are thoughtful, who work hard, who don't waste energy or money on stupid shit that no one care's about. Black people, unlike niggers, have pride in themselves, in their heritage, in their families and communities. They don't sit around and complain about injustice, they fight it. They don't bitch and moan that the system is broken, they change it. They don't demand respect from anyone, they earn it. You can always recognize a black person because his dignity is sacred to him, even if his dignity is all he's got left. A nigger doesn't give a damn about dignity; if he has any left, he'll sell it to the lowest bidder and next thing you know he's on BET.

Too many black people are content to act like niggers even though they have the power and the brains to be something more. Whether they know it or not, when they accept that label, they accept everything that comes with it: they admit to the world that the are worthless, shiftless, lazy, hostile and untrustworthy. It's not specifically anyone's fault; niggers are a symptom of poverty, of deprivation, of disillusionment, but most importantly, of hopelessness. But even recognizing that they are products of their environment, I still hate niggers for the same reason I hate white supremacists: because of the lies they spread about me, because of the false images they created in my name, and because of the label they've stamped on my forehead and expected me to wear whether I like it or not. I don't care what color your skin is, don't you dare call me "nigger" with a straight face.

Tonkin Mark-II

For starters, I'm not dead. Thanks for asking. Been a little busy trying to write a book.

But something made headlines around the world today that got my Conspiracy Senses tingling. Apparently, a "fleet" of Iranian high speed boats manuevered agressively in the presence of a bunch of American warships and for no apparent reason threatened to blow them all up. Bush goes on air calling this "provocative action" and, lo and behold, hops on a plane the very next day for a trip to Israel.

Now, normally I'm not one to get swept up into conspiracy theories. I'm quick to concede that alot of really weird things happen in this world that, if you didn't know better, would look as if someone planned them. But the timing of this just seemed really odd. Is it possible that President Bombsalot had the foresight to pull a Tonkin just before he boarded a plane to one of the most warlike countries on the face of the Earth? Surely his BFF Olmert would take that as face value, even if he thought it was fake, and the U.S. Corporate media--which so far has missed no opportunity to regurgitate Bushite propaganda on Iran--would be slow as hell to call him on it.

At first I thought I was just being paranoid, but then I saw this:


It comes in about the last thirty seconds of the tape where the video suddenly cuts away and goes to an audio clip, apparently from the bridge of the USS Hopper. Now, let's look past the fact mister "I'm coming for you... you are going to explode in a few minutes" has this weird sort of Midwestern accent that sounds like he's from Milkwaukee. Let's even look past the fact that he's talking in a growl like he's trying to disguise his voice. Let's even look past the fact that there's no logical reason for the audio to be so thoroughly disconnected from the video, seeing how the first part of the clip was shot from the bridge anyway. Let's look past all of these peculiarities and ask, "What is this?"


It doesn't look like warship to me. Doesn't even look like a motor torpedo boat. It looks a civilian speedboat with a couple of Yamaha outboard motors. It's not flying any flag, it has no visible markings, and if you watch the video you find that at least one of the other boats cruising around is painted black and grey. So what was it exactly that prompted Seaman Too-Busy-Shooting-Home-Movies-To-Report-To-My-Battle-Stations Jones to conclude that these were Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats?

Color me paranoid, but the more I chew on this the more it tastes like a sad Bush publicity stunt to sell yet another meaningless war that nobody really wants. It's a stunt that expects us to believe that the Iranian Military would be stupid enough to threaten--much less attack--three U.S. warships with a couple of unarmed speed boats. But then, the Bush Administration expects us to buy most of their other lies (the economy is strong, the Iraqis like being occupied, Chavez is a dictator and Musharraf isn't) no matter how ridiculous they appear, so I guess this one shouldn't be all that surprising. It's just history--and the Vietnam War--repeating itself.