May 11, 2010 / Lucinda / Comments Off on From June Jordan’s “The Revolution Now”
The following is an excerpt from “The Revolution Now: Update On Beloved Community”, an essay by June Jordanwritten in 1997 and delivered at a celebration of Martin Luther King’s life. Necessary strength and faith during these overwhelming times, and still so relevant:
June Jordan
And you cannot achieve a stabilized mutually respectful, conscientious, neither dominant nor submissive, love, without a revolution of the spirit that invented and imposed and enforced iniquities of inequality in the first place.
Is there reason for hope?…
,,,I know there is.
It may be small. It may be dim. But there is a fire transfiguring the muted, the daunted spirit of people everywhere. Like the “still small voice” that came to the prophet Elijah, this is not a spectacular, televised conflagration. But the burning away of passivity and misplaced anger and self-loathing among the poor and the invisible and the inaudible and the insecure and the economically dispensable and the socially ostracized–that burning away persists like the undeniable light from the farthest stars.
May 7, 2010 / Lucinda / Comments Off on Been Up So Long It Looks Like Down To Me (With Apologies To Richard Farina)
On the morning after the British election Yahoo ran a headline that read, “‘Political vacuum’ sparks market jitters”. Just what we need after the Dow does a stomach tossing dive.
Only for sure thing--a pale white guy will be the next British PM
Should ‘market jitters’ indeed be a cause for concern after a day when the market plummeted? Yes in the sense that it has the potential of further destabilizing the already dicey European markets. But… My local paper ran a headline about yesterday’s Dow fiasco that read, “Dow plunges on Greek crisis, P&G sell order.” Truth–the market plunged because those events apparently triggered a bunch of algorithmic computer-driven sell orders that effectively fed upon each other and that is what really caused the market to plunge. In other words, a bunch of computers came perilously close to plunging the already fragile world economy into a death spiral.
For months now, I’ve been trying to understand how the market could keep going up when down here on the ground, things basically suck. Too many of us are poor, hungry, unemployed, sick and homeless. There is a huge disconnect between the health of the DOW and the health of the economy. What really hasn’t been discussed in depth yet is the impact of the mounting number of huge natural and unnatural disasters on our economic equilibrium; the utter destruction of entire countries in the aftermath of earthquakes, volcanoes that cost the airlines billions and utterly disrupt the transport system that we have become dependent upon.
And now the British Petroleum/Haliburton trashing of the Gulf of Mexico. A look at the long-term impact of the Exxon Valdez spill is instructive:
Three years after the 11 million-gallon spill in Prince William Sound blackened 1,500 miles of Alaska coastline, the herring on which he and other Cordova fishermen heavily relied disappeared from the area. Platt and some others stuck around, fishing for salmon and hoping things would improve.
The herring never returned to Cordova. Platt’s income plummeted, severely straining his marriage and psyche. He dipped into his sons’ college funds to support his family…
…The herring loss alone has cost the region about $400 million over the past 21 years, according to R.J. Kopchak, a former fisherman who is now developmental director at Cordova’s Prince William Sound Science Center.
The average fisherman suffered a 30 percent loss in income after the spill, but those who specialized in just herring lost everything, Kopchak said.
It is a fair assumption that tourism dollars will plummet along the Gulf and maybe up the eastern seaboard, unemployment in those states will rise, and if you take fish oil for your heart, the price is going up. And then there is the price that cannot be calculated for destroying ocean and wetland habitats, damage that can never be undone.
The HAL 9000
There are lessons to be learned from oil slicks that spiral out of control and computer programs that take off on their own (shades of Stanley Kubrick’s HAL) and make no mistake about it, these things are going to keep happening but unlike a roller coaster where you know that after the big plunge, the ride will go back up, here on planet Earth, there is no such guarantee. Time to fasten our seatbelts.
Just got up a Twitter feed for this blog, so you can now follow me there. Turns out that Reclaiming Medusa was one character too long, and some mean other Lucinda person is using my name (and not actively tweeting, which I suppose is a blessing) so the Twitter user name is MedusaMusings.
May 3, 2010 / Lucinda / Comments Off on The Collateral Damage of an Unsustainable Lifestyle
There is so much to say about the the oil that is being spewed all over the Gulf of Mexico. Calling it a spill is a misnomer, that is what you say when a child accidentally tips over a glass of milk. This is an act of national and corporate terrorism. But still, Americans will buy gas for their cars at BP and I don’t hear Obama saying there will be a freeze on Halliburton contracts.
‘Experts’ are saying the the disaster ‘may’ cost upwards of $14 billion. No may about it, it will. Not only is there the environmental damage, we need to realize that the economy of the gulf shore is clearly shot to hell for the foreseeable future, energy prices will no doubt rise, and we already have a vulnerable economy. You add that up. And BP’s promises to pay for it, yeah, right.
Meanwhile in Massachusetts, the folly of our lack of attention to infrastructure is once more bearing fruit,
The oil, the water pipe–these are disasters for which we have only ourselves to blame. But even if we suddenly became exemplary planetary citizens, the volcanic eruption in Iceland a few weeks ago that brought the European continent to a standstill reminds us that our future would still not be ours to control.
Perhaps Margaret Atwood has already described what may happen in The Year of the Flood, –the silent flood, a disaster of epic proportions, human-made or not (it doesn’t matter in the end) that we don’t see coming and is beyond all of our fancy science and technology.
Only time will tell, but I don’t think it will take too long.
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“But love of the wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need – if only we had eyes to see.” —Edward Abbey
It’s been awhile since I posted to this blog, for all the usual reasons–family obligations, other work, too much to say, no words to adequately say it, sheer exhaustion. In the meantime, I’ve been posting assorted links to the Reclaiming Medusa Facebook page, which has given me a chance to get a sense of which of the many stories of our day resonate most deeply within my psyche. Going forward, I hope to be able to post those here first, but at least for the next few weeks, due to other commitments, it will remain sporadic.
A few nights ago, I read a wonderful passage by Jeannette Armstrong in the 2010 We Moon calendar(p. 91) describing the Okangan Indian of having someone speak for each of the components that make up our world–water, air, elders, children, etc. as part of the community decision making process which also includes examining how any given decision will impact each of these components. She writes,
There’s a built-in principle in terms of how we interact…Someone has to ask those questions…
…When we include the perspective of land and include the perspective of human relationship, one of the things that happens is that community changes. People in the community change. The realization that people and community are there to sustain you creates the most secure feeling in the world.
Many years ago, I was visiting with a friend whose young child was on a streak of wild behavior. She looked at him in exasperation and said, “You are making a lot of decisions, most of them wrong.” I’m not sure that was the most pc way a super perfect parent would have phrased it, but it was a rather accurate observation from someone with the wisdom of seeing beyond the immediate time and space horizon of a toddler.
We live in a world where we seem to have about as much collective perspective as that adorable child had that morning way back when. As children do, he survived toddlerhood without too much damage and grew to be a wonderful young man. The grownup inhabitants of planet earth on the other hand seem to be throwing one perpetual tantrum and are in serious need of time out. One wonders what would happen if we were to mature out of this and adopt the wisdom of the Okangans.
This morning I awoke to the image of a little girl in Afghanistan. I don’t know her name, let’s call her the Accidental Terrorist–she had the prettiest dark eyes, wide open staring sightless at the sky, her body mangled and bloody, a victim of one of the recent U.S. bombing attacks. She was just a little girl.
She must have run outside to play despite warnings from the soldiers to stay inside and keep her head down. She wasn’t a terrorist, and we are not safer for her death. Instead, we have destroyed a piece of the future of the world. It was not ours to so wantonly dismiss.
I wonder–did the young soldiers who dropped the bomb know that children would be killed? Can they live with that? What will they tell their children about the day they killed a little girl who ran out to play in Afghanistan?
We’ve gotten to a point in this country where it is almost like a case of mass assisted suicide. Jonestown without the koolaid. Our schools and roads are in disrepair. Sick, broke, unemployed and foreclosed have become our public lack of options. Our air is unbreathable and our water undrinkable, our press corp spends countless hours reporting on Tiger Woods’ apology and boys who don’t go up in balloons and teabag rallies and whether Sarah Palin is a creditable candidate for President. And in the name of ending terrorism, we send our children to kill other children half way around the world.
If Bin Laden is high-fiving somewhere out of sight, who can blame him for we have become the destructive force that he aspired to be.
Today, Rainforest Action Network (RAN) hosts PUT CHASE ON THE RUN, a social media day of action, to convince Chase bank to stop funding mountaintop removal coal mining in the Appalachian Mountains.
JP Morgan Chase is the biggest U.S. financier of Mountaintop Removal (MTR). Mountaintop removal is the highly destructive mining practice that blows apart the tops of mountains in order to access coal in the cheapest way possible. MTR has buried over 2000 miles of rivers and streams and destroyed nearly 1.2 million acres of the Appalachian range. MTR has severely contaminated the air and drinking water, causing increased rates of mortality and disease for local people in the mountains of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia.
Join dozens of organizations and thousands of online activists in convincing Chase to stop destroying American mountains. Take a simple action on your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, blog or email to end mountaintop removal in 2010. Go to www.DirtyMoney.org for instructions and PUT CHASE ON THE RUN!
MTR has destroyed nearly 1.2 million acres of Appalachian forest and mountains
MTR has buried over 2000 miles of rivers and streams with debris and pollution
Tap water in many Appalachian communities is not safe to drink due to coal contamination
MTR techniques resulted in a 29% loss of jobs from 1987-1997, even as coal production rose 32%
JP Morgan Chase is the biggest funder in the U.S. of mountaintop removal coal mining
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This story is personal for me. Aside from the fact that I can think of few things more heinous than cutting off the top of a mountain and dumping it in a stream along with all the pollution of land, air and water that goes with it, not to mention the horrendous economic damage done, I have an account at JP Morgan Chase. I didn’t used to. When I moved to Louisville 20 plus years ago, I opened an account at a branch of Liberty National Bank that was just down the street. And check out this lovely picture of their downtown office. It was sort of like the bar in Cheers–everyone knew your name. Then Liberty was bought by Bank One and that in turn was swallowed by Chase. It never occurred to me to look into the politics of what they do with money until now, but I am deeply offended and angry. You are not being a good citizen of this state if you are destroying it. The little branch office where I go still maintains the Cheers-like familiarity but when you look beneath the surface, it doesn’t feel so friendly anymore.
It is a major pain in the ass to move your bank account, especially when you have things on auto-pay as I do. I would prefer not to have to waste my time with all that. What I do plan to do is take a copy of this post with me the next time I go to the bank and give it to the branch manager and if you have an account at Chase, I urge you to do the same. It is not okay for big banks to come into our communities and destroy them (and Chase has a pretty nasty record with home foreclosures too), and they don’t need our loyalty, even after 20 plus years, if they do so.
Those of you of a certain age will remember those grade school Armageddon drills where we we were instructed to get under our desks and put our heads between our knees in case of a nuclear attack, a tactic that served no purpose and certainly wouldn’t have saved us if the Commies attacked.
Afghan villagers should stay inside and “keep their heads down” when thousands of U.S. Marines launch a massive assault on a densely-populated district in coming days, NATO’s civilian representative to Afghanistan said Tuesday.
The results are predictable, here is Robert Naiman‘s well-worded summary of the results:
“Civilian casualties are inevitable,” said U.S. officials before launching their weekend military assault on Marja in southern Afghanistan, and in this case, they were telling the truth. Yesterday, the New York Timesreports, a U.S. rocket strike “hit a compound crowded with Afghan civilians… killing at least 10 people, including 5 children.”
What justification has been provided by the government of the United States for its decision to kill these five children?
It will be argued that the government of the United States did not decide to kill these five children specifically, and that’s absolutely true. The U.S. government did not decide to kill these particular children; it only decided to kill some Afghan civilians, chosen randomly from Marja’s civilian population, when it decided to launch its military assault. These five children simply had the misfortune of holding losing tickets in a lottery in which they did not choose to participate…
…NATO forces have decided to advise civilians in Marjah not to leave their homes, although they say they do not know whether the assault will lead to heavy fighting.
These five kids were staying inside, as instructed. It didn’t save them from U.S. rockets. Perhaps they weren’t keeping their heads down.
You can read the rest of Naiman’s commentary here. Suffice it to say, “Duck” is not an acceptable strategy for protecting civilians and should be seen as a gross violation of international law.
Billions of dollars spent killing children. How dare we talk about winning or honor.
My first car was a Buick, a hand-me-down from my father who wanted me to have a safe car. It came with Firestone 500 tires, but that’s another story. When the Buick finally died, as an act of rebellion, I bought a Toyota. Since then, I’ve owned 4 of them. 4 cars in 30 years. I was a good driver and they were, for the most part good cars. Until last August when I traded in my 10 year old van, who went by the name of Van Gogh, for a Camry. I’d been planning to buy a smaller, more efficient car, but the very nice shocks and lumbar support spoke to my middle-aged body (that’s defined as I could get in and out of it without pain). And the mileage was much better than the van, which sadly had gotten an official 19 mph, meaning it wasn’t a Clunker so no rebate like those folks who traded in for more efficient trucks that got 18 mph.
By the time I had owned it for 2 days, I knew that despite months of test-driving various cars, I’d made a bad choice. For one thing, there was no logical place to put my purse, something I’m guessing male designers weren’t too worried about. Second, the rear vision is lousy. And you have to do some weird body contortions to plug your pod into the USB port.
But its those new-fangled electronic keys that are not actually keys that leave me just gob-smacked. You start the car by pushing a button that works if the key is in radio range. Okay, kinda cool but…if the battery in the gizmo dies, it’s a problem although there is a workaround, explained in detail in the manual that I completely did not understand.
20th Century Key versus 21rst Century Smart Key System
And what if you lose your keys? No problem, Toyota will make you a new one. But it will cost a couple hundred dollars. This is supposedly an advancement on the old-fashioned kind of key that cost about $3 to replace and could be gotten at the hardware store and did not require batteries. But wait, it gets better.
The very best thing about the key that isn’t a key (in fact just to avoid any confusion, Toyota refers to it as a “smart key system”) is that it takes more than 20 pages in the manual to explain how to use it as well as a whole other section on what to do if the key fails. My particular favorite paragraph reads,
When riding in an aircraft:
When bringing a key with a wireless remote control function onto an aircraft, make sure you do not press any buttons on the key while inside the aircraft cabin. If you are carrying the key in your bag, etc. ensure that the buttons are not likely to be pressed accidentally. Pressing a button may cause the key to emit radio waves that could interfere with the operation of the aircraft.
Of course Toyota could have maybe provided a locking mechanism, but no dice. The best part is that instead of posting this warning in huge letters on the front of the manual, it is buried on page 25.
Which brings us to the small matter of the floor mats that might catch on accelerator pedals that might not quit accelerating. And you know it is major doodoo when they quit making the cars and haven’t issued a fix. But they have lots of helpful advice about what to do if the problem occurs (press down firmly on the brakes and presumably kiss your ass goodbye).
So cars were invented what, about a hundred years ago? Forgive me the presumption, but if I’m paying tens of thousands of dollars for one of these (and that after hours of dickering, and I do not use that word lightly, with the sales dude, I’m taking the leap of faith that the car manufacturer will provide me a product that:
Starts
Goes
Stops and
Does 1-3 safely
Hello Toyota, your customers deserve better than being told to just keep driving your new-fangled death mobiles. How about you give us our money back? Offer us free service for life if indeed this is fixable? In the meantime, and I can just imagine my father trying not to smirk, might be time to go check out those Buicks.
I’ll leave you with Neil Young’s ode to his first car:
Several years ago, in an effort to make sure that I had no excuse for not getting enough exercise, I bought a treadmill. Multi-tasker that I am, the plan was that I would do catch up on my inevitably overflowing reading pile while doing the cardio-vascular thing. Turns out that I am not one of those walks and chews gum let alone runs well with scissors types. So I broke down and started to watch television while I exercise.
Before going further, I should perhaps share that I didn’t watch much television as a child, an hour a day at most, well below today’s norm. We didn’t even have a color television until I was almost in college, not that we couldn’t, it was just deemed unnecessary. After I graduated college and got my first apartment, one of my first purchases was a small television. I actually bought that before I bought a bed or a table. And I sat down and watched it. And watched it. I watched soaps, I watched Dallas. The cheesier the better. This went on for a few years. And then I was over it and since then, my limited television watching, by national standards, has been practically unpatriotic.
But now thanks to my treadmill, I am catching up with what makes America tick, and it isn’t pretty, and I”m not even watching Fox (it might get my heart rate up a bit higher, the gastro-intestinal risk is just too high). While there is no shortage of edifying entertainment options out there , I’m finding the advertisements far more interesting. For instance, after a lifetime of being told to worry if my butt is too big, now there are undies that make your butt look bigger.
Not only that, but ‘news’ programs that you are supposed to take seriously actually spend time analyzing if this is a good product or not.
This is serious stuff, it is our ticket out of economic malaise according to Robert Reich who tells us that we need to spend if we are going to recover:
The truth, of course, is that the most important fiscal indicator is the ratio of the debt to the GDP. And the most important issue there is how quickly America can get jobs back and the GDP growing again. More spending in the short term is the only way to accelerate a jobs recovery, and reduce the debt-GDP ratio over the longer term.
So spend, baby, spend, get that 2nd pair of Booty Pops free, you just have to spring for the extra shipping and handling. But first we might want to do a wee bit of thinking about the economy those fancy new undies are helping to save.
First the good news, at least if you happen to work in the top echelon of a large financial institution:
Major U.S. banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their people about $145 billion for 2009, a record sum that indicates how compensation is climbing despite fury over Wall Street’s pay culture.
An analysis by The Wall Street Journal shows that executives, traders, investment bankers, money managers and others at 38 top financial companies can expect to earn nearly 18% more than they did in 2008—and slightly more than in the record year of 2007. The conclusions are based on an examination of securities filings for the first nine months of 2009 and revenue estimates through year-end.
earned $11.7 billion last year, more than double its profit in 2008, and generated record revenue. The bank earned $3.3 billion in the fourth quarter alone.
on Friday announced a record $9.3 billion payday for its investment-banking employees, setting the stage for competitors like Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS) to also make eye-popping payouts. On a per employee basis, JPMorgan investment bankers, sales staff and traders, on average, are set to make about $379,000 for 2009, up more than $100,000 from 2008, when the broader financial sector was mired in crisis.
“People looking at it from the outside look at the dollars and say they are high,” said Kenneth Raskin, the head of law firm White & Case. “There is no question the dollars are high. The question is whether they were deserving.“
No, actually the question is how do these people live with themselves and why has this been allowed to happen. Based on the above, they earned as much as $279,000 a piece in 2008 while the economy imploded. There is no question of whether they are deserving. They are not, and no amount of Booty Pop wearing women is going to make them look better. Incidentally, according to the same article, median U.S. household income in 2008 was $50,303.
Consumer inflation was tame in 2009, with prices rising 2.7 percent. Yet families felt squeezed as their spending power sank in the face of falling wages, job losses and higher prices for energy, medical care and education.A surge in energy prices last year offset the biggest drop in food costs in nearly a half century.
The Labor Department says its Consumer Price Index rose a modest 0.1 percent in December. Excluding food and energy, prices were also up just 0.1 percent last month.
The Commerce Department said on Thursday retail sales fell 0.3 percent last month, the first decline since September, as consumers spent less on vehicles and an array of other goods during the holiday shopping month.
Analysts had expected an increase of 0.5 percent, but disappointment was tempered by upward revisions to prior months’ data. November sales were revised to show a 1.8 percent gain from an initially reported 1.3 percent increase, and October sales were bumped up a touch as well.
A separate report from the Labor Department showed initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 11,000 to 444,000 last week, higher than the 437,000 claims analysts surveyed by Reuters had forecast.
A separate report showed inflation-adjusted weekly wages for the 12 months ending in December were down 1.6 percent, the biggest decline since 1990. Slack wages and scarce job creation have slowed consumer spending, hindering the economy’s ability to mount a strong recovery…
…While the economy remains on a steady recovery path, the housing market — the main trigger of the economic downturn — continues to show signs of stress.
The nation closed out 2009 with a record number of foreclosure actions and is poised to set a fresh record this year, real estate data company RealtyTrac said.
According to the group, 2.8 million properties with a mortgage received a foreclosure notice last year, up 21 percent from 2008 and 120 percent from 2007.
And in case you were curious, even the porn industry is suffering.
This is what a buy stuff so we can make more stuff economy looks like when it goes bad. Mr. Reich’s solution is to prop that system up, including more military spending, which the President and Congress keep happily ponying up,
President Barack Obama will ask Congress for an additional $33 billion to fight unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on top of a record $708 billion for the Defense Department next year, The Associated Press has learned..
Compare that to the amount of aid that the U.S. is offering to Haiti, as Jesse Hagopian points out,
Yesterday, Secretary Hilary Clinton was sent to Haiti and gave a speech saying that the US is doing “every thing we can” to help the Haitian people. But that fact that her trip to the Haitian airport stopped all aid from arriving for three hours – three critical hours on a day when the difference between life and death for tens of thousands is a drink of water – should tell you everything you need to know about the US relief effort.
Obama has pledged $100 million, which will only just begin to help; and only if it is used for direct aid at all and not squandered on private contractors looking to make a dime (or many millions of dimes) off the suffering of Haitians.
U.S. Bankers got bonuses totaling over $100 billion last year. The US is spending trillions to destroy countries in the Middle East. We can raise the money needed to help our brothers and sisters of Haiti, but it is going to take ordinary people doing extraordinary things to push even the liberals in power to help.
Then there is the healthcare bill, which whatever the cost, will still leave some of the most needy in the lurch,
At any given time, an estimated 1.8 million disabled workers languish in the Medicare coverage gap, a cost saver instituted nearly 40 years ago. Many, like Walker, are uninsured. Lawmakers had hoped to eliminate the gap as part of health care overhaul, but concluded it would be too expensive.
Too expensive to care for those most in need…And just a little over a week ago, Secretary Clinton pledged “$63 billion over six years to improve global health by investing in efforts to reduce maternal and child mortality, prevent millions of unintended pregnancies, and avert millions of new HIV infections.”
So there you have it, our national economy--$63 billion over 6 years for global health, $100 million in aid and not enough to care for the most medically needy…$145 billion to bankers on Wall Street…$708 billion for ‘defense’, and $19.95 (plus shipping and handling) for Booty Pops. Not technically the definition of a depression, but definitely depressing.
Until we redefine what a healthy economy is, one that supports caring and sustainability, Wall Street may continue to thrive. For awhile. But the downhill spiral for Main Street and our national soul is picking up momentum and the current prescriptions from economic talking heads will not save it.
Lucinda Marshall is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Inheritance Of Aging Self (Finishing Line Press,2021) and is available for purchase from Finishing Line Press, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon. She is also a quilt, mixed media, and graphic design artist. For more information, please email LucindaMarshall @ lucindamarshall.com.
