The Road to Reparations

In the process of getting to know the Green Party, sooner or later you realize that we favor African Americans to the point of calling for reparations for over 200 years of discrimination. This is ultimately what it will take to heal race relations in our country, but rather than diving headfirst into what would quickly become a major bone of contention, we should practice the art of the possible by going for a series of small wins. Black women have it particularly hard, as detailed in a report put out this week by The National Domestic Workers Alliance. One of their priority recommendations is:

Policymakers and workforce development leaders should adopt

Photo by Jake Kitchener

strategies to promote gender and racial/ethnic equity in access to higher-paid career training opportunities. Workforce development programs that recruit and train Black women in specific skills can help them gain access to career ladders and upward mobility and can reduce their concentration in lower-paying jobs.

The Green Party prioritizes women's rights and racial equality in their platform section dealing with Civil Rights and Equal Rights. It also puts an emphasis on poor mothers of all races, though Black mothers are more than twice as likely to be under the poverty line than White mothers.

The Green Party supports real reforms to end poverty and return dignity and opportunity to all mothers. We call for implementing innovative programs that work with the particular and special needs of motherhood. 

and, under Livable Income, the platform calls for helping all impoverished citizens:

Workforce development programs must aim at moving people out of poverty.

It is very hard to accept one's own diminution while watching another group's ascension. Such acceptance disappoints both our expectancy and sense of equity. By taking small steps, such as reducing poverty among the most downtrodden by enabling them to become more employable, we can temper the resentment felt by both sides. At the same time, we must continue to press for many more measures such as the recommendations in the NDWA report and the 2014 Black Women in the United States report in order to make it over the high bar of granting reparations, thus upholding our values pertaining to social justice, gender equality, and diversity.

The Fugger Factor

Five hundred years ago, as the Reformation was brewing in Germany, the Fugger family soared to

Jakob Fugger „the Rich" (1459–1525), by Albrecht Dürer
Source :The Yorck Project {PD-US-no notice}

heights of wealth never before attained by captains of industry. Though the Fuggers strove to monopolize all of their markets, other capitalists caught on to the possibilities and managed to join the conspicuous ranks of the aristocracy. On the brink of Europe's most sweeping cultural change in centuries, the wealth of the upper class brought about what Will Durant called "the greatest economic disparities as Europe had not known since the millionaires and slaves of Imperial Rome."

In commemoration of this quincentennial, I would like to offer a new metric for recognizing the potential for disparities in economic wealth to bring about radical societal disruption; introducing "the Fugger factor." I'll leave it to folks like Thomas Piketty to quantify this metric, but suffice it to say that today's Fugger factor in the U.S. is as high as it's been since the Great Depression to the point that today's richest 0.1 percent of U.S. households now own about as much as the poorest 90 percent of the country combined.

Only the most blindly loyal of his followers hold to the promise that Blowhard's proposed budget will ultimately benefit the poor. According to Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, if we again follow the trickle down fallacies of the Reagan years, "...inequality could really reach extreme and totally unprecedented levels in the years ahead."

Perhaps Melania will read the President to sleep with passages from one of the books Pope Francis gave him during this week's visit. Laudato si contains some surprisingly germane passages on economic justice, to wit:

...we should be particularly indignant at the enormous inequalities in our midst, whereby we continue to tolerate some considering themselves more worthy than others. We fail to see that some are mired in desperate and degrading poverty, with no way out, while others have not the faintest idea of what to do with their possessions, vainly showing off their supposed superiority and leaving behind them so much waste which, if it were the case everywhere, would destroy the planet. In practice, we continue to tolerate that some consider themselves more human than others, as if they had been born with greater rights.

In their platform that advocates giving every citizen a livable income, the Green Party points out how these disparities should be viewed as a governmental problem:

The growing inequities in income and wealth between rich and poor; unprecedented discrepancies in salary and benefits between corporate top executives and line workers; loss of the "American dream" by the young and middle-class—each is a symptom of decisions made by policy-makers far removed from the concerns of ordinary workers trying to keep up.

Pope Francis takes this same view on down to other elites besides government, also pointing out the effect of urban blight, and adding a cautionary note for us green folk.

Indeed, when all is said and done, [the poor] frequently remain at the bottom of the pile. This is due partly to the fact that many professionals, opinion makers, communications media and centres of power, being located in affluent urban areas, are far removed from the poor, with little direct contact with their problems. They live and reason from the comfortable position of a high level of development and a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world’s population. This lack of physical contact and encounter, encouraged at times by the disintegration of our cities, can lead to a numbing of conscience and to tendentious analyses which neglect parts of reality. At times this attitude exists side by side with a “green” rhetoric. Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.

While the Reformation brought about a power realignment away from the church in Rome, this time it looks like the Pope is leading the charge for those who no longer care to go along with all this Fuggery.

 

Consequences of Tearing up the Social Contract

President Donald T Rump's fixation with turning our nation into America, Inc. will spell the end of our current Constitution and lead to a decentralized government more akin to a federation. Several indicators of the direction he is leading us are already popping up. By taking his time with staffing the White House, freezing hiring across most of the federal government, cutting federal regulations, keeping subordinates poorly informed, and hiring a kakistocracy of hatchet-men and -women as heads of departments, President T Rump is weakening the federal government's power both intentionally and inadvertently. During his reign, we can expect to see reductions in government provision of health care, education, food, and housing, all of which will mainly affect the poor. Environmental problems, which Rump largely plans to ignore, will also disproportionately affect poor communities. Little else will remain of the government under T Rump than a security state for conducting commerce.

As President T Rump aggregates all the remaining power of the federal government into a national security state, coercion will be the only tool left in his bag. The vulnerability of the federal government stems not only from a chaotic and unbalanced executive branch, but also from the inward-looking legislature that hangs its hope for the continued consent of the governed on trickle-down economics, i.e. raw capitalism, i.e. catering to the 1%. Even if Congress stirs from their supinity and exercises the 25th Amendment or Rump throws in the towel, the momentum of government's social influence will have been disrupted enough by his term to keep it subdued for years. Congress's days are numbered. Another major episode of the continuing financial crisis would give Rump an opportunity to dissolve that body and introduce a new Constitution. The public won't mind, either, because we have all been waiting for him to drain the swamp, which includes driving out all the alligators lurking in the halls of Congress.

By Faron Kee

Law and order, ever more elusive economic growth, and foreign wars will only work so long to hold the country together. If the various bodies of the federal government were serving the populace well, we could stay united indefinitely, but an authoritarian government that is too poor or powerless to be of any use will be rejected by the masses. In its place, states and regional bodies will come to assume some of the essential roles previously played by the feds. The evaporation of federal relevance will assist in the transition of the U.S. to a federation of independent regions as we exit the fourth turning sometime in the 2020's. It is impossible to predict what those regions will be, but Joel Kotkin has taken a stab at it. Our Constitutional crisis will probably take many years to recover from. As a writer, T Rump will be a poor replacement for T Jefferson.

No Free Lunch

Here in the 19th wealthiest county in the nation, we are without a metropolitan area unless you count the piece where I live, which is lumped together with part of St. Mary's county. We have a lot of farms in either county, so there should be no lack of wholesome food.

That being the case, what is behind the long-standing campaigns to grow and distribute free food to the "hunger community" in our area? Do such organized efforts alleviate long-term poverty? Do they invite outsiders desperate for food?

Two programs that stand out most are Farming4Hunger and End Hunger in Calvert County. Farming4Hunger appears to have the more honest appellation, since hunger might be a product of their efforts. Ending hunger is, of course, impossible and disingenuous as a campaign name.

The phrase "hunger community" is used in the annual report of Farming4Hunger and smacks of a caste system that implies separation of persons who rely on handouts for food. Joining the hunger community could enable a person to leave aside at least some of their struggle for basic necessities and enjoy some of the finer pleasures of life such as a home, a car, and pets.

Wait..., did I just say that a home, car, and pets are not necessities? Millions of Syrians and other migrants have come to that conclusion. The pets actually were probably temporary necessities for a meal or two, but the home and car were left behind, becoming aspirations once again as raw survival became the prime motivator.

The struggles of these refugees will go on for decades,

Photo by Stu Mayhew (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

mainly so their children may enjoy a better life. The irony is that many of them have a better chance of dealing with the economic turmoil ahead than the staid classes among whom they have infiltrated. What of those here in the 19th richest county in the USA who are insulated from those hardships. Will their children know how to dig themselves out?

Stasis. That is what is behind food giveaways. We want big ag to continue, so we have programs like Farming4Hunger that says the way to get food is through farming as we know it, and supports farmers who can't sell part of their crop on the market. We want people to think well of our charity, either as churches or corporations, so we sponsor programs like End Hunger in Calvert County which should be looking for ways to put themselves out of business, but seem interested in endless growth.

This stasis will not bring stability. Our current food system and growth paradigm is unsustainable. People need to be taught how to grow food and protect the soil. Those things, in themselves, are a struggle for anyone, but there's really no free lunch.