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A Word from Richard Risemberg for February, 2004The New FeudalismHow Many Little Lies Does It Take to Add up to a Big Lie?
Thousands of US, British, and a few other countries' troops swarm over Iraq, and highly-specialized teams sweep the country searching for the fabled "weapons of mass destruction." They have found none--in fact, they have given up looking. The CIA's own boy in town says there ain't no WMDs. They have found no poisons, no germs, no atom bombs, no missiles capable of launching them over the sea. They have found nothing. They dug up Saddam, but they haven't found Osama, who actually perpetrated the 9/11 atrocities. (Oh, I'm sorry: they have found oil…of course.) So now their excuse is, "Well, the world is better off without Saddam in power anyway. If the first lie was that Saddam was ready to destroy the entire Western world on a whim, the second was that the Cheney administration gave a damn about his oppression of the Iraqi people. After all, the people who directed the bombing of Iraq this year were exchanging hugs with that same Saddam--whom the world already knew for a fiend--a few short years ago, when he was happy to do business with US corporations. But then he invaded oily Kuwait, instigating the first Gulf War; more recently, Saddam had turned to Europe, and had even declared his willingness to accept euros as the exchange currency in oil transactions. A short while later, the rockets rained. And after the dust settled, we found that, far from greeting US and British troops with roses as liberators, the Iraqi underground greeted them with bombs and bullets, as occupiers. And the silent majority of Iraqis sits back at a distance, waiting to see who will win before deciding which side to cheer. Meanwhile, the People's Republic of China, which may have nearly as many political prisoners in its jails as there are Iraqis in Iraq, is happily carrying forward a decades-long project of ethnic cleansing in its own "Thirteenth Province," Tibet. Beijing invaded it long ago to great protests from the streets of the world, but to a delicate silence from the governments whose corporate co-whores do business with this particular set of cruel dictators--dictators armed with actual weapons of mass destruction, which are actually mounted on rockets aimed at the United States. What's the relevance of these foreign-policy issues to readers of a magazine on urban sustainability? Plenty. Let's start with the 87 billion dollars the Cheney administration recently demanded, and got, for the reconstruction of Iraq. This follows, of course, a tax cut that, much like California's infamous Proposition 13, throws a couple of stale dog biscuits to working folks and shovels great slabs of meat to the wealthy and to corporations. Now the Cheney bunch asks us further to mortgage our future to protect the privilege of favored corporations to bid unchallenged for contracts to "reconstruct" Iraq. (Most of those corporations are, by ingenious happenstance, directed by friends and former colleagues of administration officials.) Meanwhile, universal health care--a normal benefit to taxpayers in all other First World countries--is too expensive to think of, school funding must shrink and schools become more "efficient," mass transit (which they see as a communist plot anyway) does not deserve any subsidy, and so on. Then there are all those lost jobs. Cheney's puppet gets on TV and tells the world proudly how the unemployment stats have gone down last week--never mentioning that they have done so because the methodology of counting unemployed persons excludes anyone who has gotten so discouraged that they stopped looking for work. Nor does it count those whose benefits have run out. They may be out of work, but they're not "unemployed." Meanwhile, the corporate lords are falling over each other to be the first to hire docile wage slaves in Third World countries where labor and environmental protections are conspicuously lacking. US workers, they say, are not "competitive". Lies, all lies…. What are they really saying when they say labor must be competitive? They are saying that US workers should be willing to endure--nay, accept with pleasure!--the standard of living of a Honduran sweatshop prisoner. The present long-running market workers' strike provides an illustration. The argument that you must depress employee benefits and compensation in order to compete with the Wal-Marts of the world (the current excuse) is typically shortsighted and self-defeating. Wal-Mart's business model depends on a workforce that accepts, out of desperation, wage and benefit packages that do not permit them to live any but a marginal existence, barely able to afford fastfood meals and decrepit apartments and trailers to live in; they are certainly not the lively consumers on which the US economy depends. They are so poor that much of their cost of living is subsidized by government programs designed for the destitute--making Wal-Mart one of the most blatant welfare queens in our nation, since its profits depend on this. The answer to the Wal-Mart threat is not to push down your own employees to the level of Wal-Mart's pitiful serfs; it is to support union efforts to organize Wal-Mart employees, and those of other like entities. Otherwise you will end up institutionalizing a culture of poverty and misery--a New Feudalism, if you will--that will ultimately deprive you of your own customers. Unions strive to build prosperity for all--for the worker cannot prosper without work, and the employer cannot prosper without customers. Realistically, those customers are not the top 1% of our economic system. Even the rich can eat only so many bowls of corn flakes, right? The supermarkets' customers are the working many, not the idle few. But if they don't earn well, if they don't feel safe from the threat of a medical condition driving them into bankruptcy, they will not--they will not be able to--spend the money that ultimately makes their employers wealthy. It was unions that built the middle class in this country, against the wishes of employers; it was the middle class that built prosperity in this country, benefiting also its employers. The same argument applies to outsourcing: we cannot build prosperity by bringing US workers down to the level of illiterate wage slaves in poisoned equatorial landscapes. We build prosperity--and peace--by encouraging high wages and safe and sustainable social and economic lives for Third World citizens. The Wrong Wingers also persistently deride the functional and financial viability of mass transit, especially rail, while never noting the vast costs of free roads for all; these not only cost money to build and maintain, they also cost the state money in tax income lost to houses and workplaces destroyed--or prevented from coming into being--to make room for those roads. There are also a myriad of associated public costs that few ever mention, such as complex and expensive flood drainage systems required to handle runoff from the vast acreages of paving private driving imposes on the land; the full list is beyond the scope of this article. Meanwhile, writers such as Hank Dittmar point out that "a University of North Texas study found that Dallas' DART light-rail system had generated more than $800 million in development, while Portland, Ore.'s MAX light-rail line was found to have generated $2.4 billion in economic development. Arlington County, Va., which focuses growth around its MetroRail stations, generates more than one-third of its tax revenues from the 7 percent of the county's land area within walking distance of the stations, and that helps Arlington have the lowest tax rate of any northern Virginia county." [Emphasis added--Ed.] Who, then, is really for efficient taxation and private enterprise--as opposed to massive subsidies to huge corporate collectives designed along Stalinist models? I recently read an article in the New York Times quoting a conservative senator who referred to a leader who left his land so "devastated by his terrible plundering of the country for frankly military purposes, their ability to pay back debt [is] almost nonexistent for some time." He was referring to Saddam Hussein, of course, but the words apply to Dubya as well, who has just sacrificed a generation of prosperity in the name of a military budget famously larger than that of the next twenty military powers combined, primarily to support a crusade whose purpose is to help Dick Cheney keep the trough he's led his former corporate buddies to nice and full of gravy, at the taxpayer's expense. An illustration: A little before the time that Congress was voting that much-contended $87 billion dollars to further subsidize the Neocons' second happy jaunt--the first being that one that brought democracy, prosperity, and peace to Afghanistan (wait a second?)--a US general asked a team of corporate consultants to report how much it would cost to bring a cement plant back on line in the region of Iraq he administered. The consultants reported that it would take at least $50 million dollars. Since the general's entire budget wouldn't come near that amount, he got creative--or perhaps treasonous: he rounded up a bunch of Iraqi engineers and had them get to work on the project. The result, a few weeks later: a functioning cement plant, providing jobs for the locals and materials to rebuild the country. The cost: $80,000.00. Please note the commas and periods: that's eighty thousand dollars. The Neoconservative lords of our present ruling structure have no intention of bringing democracy to Iraq, because they don't believe in it even at home. They have been grinding viciously away at freedom of speech and expression, freedom of assembly, and even the right to sue a corporation for damages their faulty or dangerous products and misleading ads may cause. Meanwhile, corporations who wish to engage in misleading advertising claim 1st Amendment protection; counter their ads with your own "uncommercials" (as Adbusters.org calls them)--if you can place them anywhere in the corporate media--and be prepared to face vigorous obstruction and even lawsuits. The real agenda here is to impose a New Feudalism on the world, a political and economic structure in which the ragged masses toil for the sole benefit of the lords of commerce, trapped in a blandscape of 10-lane roads and blankwalled bigboxes, fed a pittance in wages, nourished on greaseburgers in cardboard buns, living to commute to a dead-end job in the morning and come home to a dead-end street at night, to watch the tube until their souls are deadened too. Alone in their cubicles, cars, and couches, with no place to be that isn't beholden to some corporate boss somewhere, except the streets they drive on. Destroy community, as the corporate whores are doing, using the combination of TV, with its single worldview, and the relentless privatization of everything; have all persons directly subject to private authority, with no power of their own; reduce the government to the enforcement arm of corporate capitalism; and you approach the perfection of classic Fascism. Mussolini, its formulator, described Fascism as "the melding of state and corporate power," and that's what the New Feudalism will use as its foundation. History has shown us that this is in every way unsustainable. It will destroy our lives and souls, our cultures, and ultimately our very planet. We must stop them now.
Recommended reading:
Richard Risemberg Go to A Word from Eric Miller
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They have lied to us.