A Week or So Ago: [45], Politics, & a Leftist Forum on Honduras and the Philippines that Inspired an Epiphany
A few events have converged thematically for me two weeks ago to help me reach a useful epiphany for my project, for my cause(s), and for life (this entry took me a few days of a couple-hour sessions to write!). The events are:
The essay from two weeks ago really speaks for itself, my despair, and my hope. If anything, I think it set the base for my asking about the motivations of people to do or neglect to do things that increase suffering in the world, especially when they do it under the auspices of love, kindness, and good.
The double dealing of [45] and weaselness of Stephen Miller and the Far Right Congressmen provide me example of the lack of caring, the shameful one-upmanship real politicking, and crass bigotry (made even worse over last weekend by [45] when he said that he's the least racist person that the media would interview. Add to that fire, the enabling of [45] by Martin Luther King's nephew and the Haitian Ambassador when they just called him ignorant rather than outright call at least his statements racist.
(COMMENT FROM RIGHT BEFORE POSTING: I appreciate Lindsey Graham's point out [45]'s penchant for vengeance, but Graham provides another example of enabling by stating that [45] isn't racist)
These two events only set the stage, put the logs in the fire pit. The forum last wek put the kindling and newspaper in the fire pit with the logs. I don't remember many specific details, mostly feelings and interactions when they occurred. The forum generally went as follows:
For that reason and to finally post SOMETHING, this post is TO BE CONTINUED. In my next original essay, I discuss the epiphany I had at the end of last weekend that I believe will help emotionally provide a filler argument for my project and will give me an "opponent" to fight in the goal of increasing more emotional attunement in the world.
Some quick research reveals, however, that the recent issues down in Honduras started with the 2009 coup d'etat staged by their Supreme Court and military (but can be traced all the way back to the '70s and '80s Cold War action by the US). If you kept up with things during the 2016 Election starting in 2015, that coup should ring a bell since many of her Progressive and Conservative critics attribute the final result to Hillary Clinton (in what appears a little facilitation and mostly inaction to try mitigating supposed "communist" influence in South America and increase the US military-industrial complex influence down there).
I've reached this understanding of the events by reading some articles at The Intercept, The Guardian, and The Nation. I remember hearing some stories on NPR years ago about corporations disrupting the land and lifestyles of indigenous people, too, but I don't recall too many details about that news.
I won't make judgments on Clinton's suitability for President since she didn't get elected, and frankly, our relationship with Honduras probably wouldn't be that different. Right now seems like just a continuation on past policy in Honduras. Hearing this woman talk about the protests and and Human Rights violations of the Honduras government moved me, but there were a lot of details that I didn't record and can't remember.
Buni started by mentioning Ferdinand Marcos then also mentioned Rodrigo Duterte. Clicking on those links will take you to their Wikipedia entries, where you will find many horrors that they had and do perform with a large amount of impunity in the Philippines. Duterte even won his last election by bragging about extrajudicial shootings he performed to kill drug users and others who would insult him because of his tribal ethnicity. Law and order, these types of kleptocrats don't need it apparently.
After mentioning these two most infamous names, Buni provided a bunch of reliable alternative journalistic resources to get up to date and stay up to date on news and their Resistance. Below is a screen capture from their Facebook page of the media list:
She provided a bunch of numbers about atrocities and showed them on the screen at the front of the room, a lot of numbers. Then she moved onto probably the best part of the forum. Up on the front screen, Buni projected a map of the Philippines that had symbols that showed the locations of natural resources. Most of the resources lay in the south part of the Philippines, not surprising with the uprisings occurring there and the martial law that Duterte has declared. That type of sense doesn't make for valid logic, but where there is smoke, there is fire.
She also showed a great slide illustrating colonialist neoliberal neomercantilism. Arguably all these three words describe the same thing. Buni explained that the Philippines imports a lot of finished products, while a lot of their raw natural resources get exported out of the country, mostly from and to the United States.
It benefits the leaders of the Philippines while putting a large burden on the middling and lower classes since much of their work comes from extracting the resources then shipping it out. Workers in the Philippines enter the chain of labor at the bottom, generating the most raw materials, then as those materials move up the chain of labor and become refined into a more usable product, the surplus value/value added of the produccts grows increasingly until the end consumer purchases it, providing the final seller the most value.
This process sounds great in theory, product value generation as more people work and get paid wages. Problems arise, however, when these workers at the bottom then purchase the final products because they can't purchase that much or many times not any product at all, and they probably put the most physical work and most risk in the whole process obtaining the raw materials to send up the chain of production. All that to get little in return, even when taking into account the local economy where a lot of people get into this situation. How many hours do they have to work attaining a natural resource that makes multiple units of a product, so that they could make enough money to buy one unit of that product?
A lot of this happens in the Philippines, in Honduras, and many other places in the world because the governments of these countries end up ceding or selling land and resource rights to corporations that originate in more developed countries, a lot of the times companies from the United States and Europe. We can likely include China, Russia, and other large economies, too. A lot of this activity occurs through bribery and corruption with polticians in high positions. They even mentioned Dole as one of the big corporations engaging in this activity, a company that I referenced back in 2012 when discussing how big corporations do major stuff like this in Costa Rica and Central and South America for the huge banana industry.
Mercantilism, this category of national economic policy, is when a country looks to maximize its profits, through the form of its people laboring, its corporations, and in the modern-day United States, to pay the taxes and pay back debt it has accumulated. The worst part: mercantilism doesn't care what damage it does to people outside of the nation, it only concerns itself with that particular nation.
During the colonial times of New England, Britain put in a lot of mercantilist laws to restrict trade between New England traders and non-British West Indies. Britain wanted the resources and goods from the colonies. If they weren't going to keep the trade in the British empire through unregulated trade, they would tax and tariff legitimate trading with foreign countries, restricting trade going to other countries and keeping it in Britain, or at least putting money into their coffers from trade going out of the empire.
This very profitable direct trade, which Britain didn't like, supported slavery, but the British Empire wasn't putting these laws into place to fight slavery. They wanted a cut of the profits, and they didn't want other countries to get it. As all the countries saw it back then (and many insider elites see now), wealth was a zero sum game, the more you had, the less they had; the more they had, the less you had. These laws and acts by Parliament contributed a lot to at least New England pushing for the American Revolution.
That pretty much sums up colonial mercantilism: gain control of the resources and direct them all back to home to maximize assets and capital, other parties be damned. The politicians and wealthy don't care much about the workers, either. Do whatever is needed to bring that wealth back into their hands. Add neoliberalism, basically let the corporations do all the work outside the mother country but provide them with covert and even military support. If possible, though, let forces of other nations do the dirty work and, if required, invite those forces to the motherland to teach them how to do the dirty work. Do it right, then profits, taxes, and prosperity will come back to the motherland. Who cares about the little people who get in the way? (Sound familiar?)
The explanations of the neo-mercantilism that Buni provided gripped me, mixed with the questioning that I did here a couple weeks ago, and also my understanding of the British Empire colonial history in America, especially the slave trade and all the ancillary markets that came from it -- all these things bothered me, boiled around in my head, and supported a statement I made on social media some time ago about Marx was right that workers worldwide will need to Resist and discussions during the 2016 Election about outsiders/Progressives needing to resist for the good of the planet and the human race.
All of this mixing around in my head still bothered me, though. As I had for a long time, I couldn't understand the motivation of the insiders and the controllers of this system. Many of them feed us propaganda about how capitalism and free trade support freedom and prosperity. Small businesses and direct trade would lead to a better world. The fact that at least the US needs people to work and pay taxes to bankroll it seems to contradict these practices. I even put forward the hypothesis that corporations and producers of goods and services need customers, and wouldn't more customers be better than minimal customers, so wouldn't they seek to get more people free, more people to work, and more people producing, so that these people can end up paying more in taxes and buying more products to bankroll the corporations? (But with how much Conservatives in the US hate birth control and push for untrained labor, their Stoic moral code seems to also support their neoliberalism.)
And based on my questions, feelings, and the elucidation provided by these two presentations, my mind gets pushed closer to reaching my epiphany. Before getting there, though, I need to address John Beacham's part in the forum (coordinator from Answer Chicago -- of this forum or of the organization?).
Instead, Beacham talked about how the working class in the "Rust Belt" that hold a lot of responsibility for electing [45] into office were very much the same as the workers in Honduras, the Philippines, and other countries outside of the United States. . .and some of the big problems come from not reaching that population. If they could be reached with information provided by Answer, this "Rust Belt" working class could liberate themselves and help make the country and world a better place.
Beacham also made interesting statements when he compared "small" street gangs with the drug cartels. Beacham argued that the small street gangs committed crimes but not as horrendous as the drug cartels. Also, the drug cartels had influence over governments while "small" street gangs had influence over smaller communities and little interaction with governments.
Both these claims and comparisons have some element of truth to them, but Beacham made them from a position of privilege. A black journalist in the audience, who I believe also mentioned that he may have had some sort of disability (which didn't seem very apparent by his erudite criticisms), took Beacham to task. The journalist pointed out that:
I agree with both points of the journalist. Beacham really rubbed me the wrong way. I think he had a good knowledge of events that happened in the past and institutions in the United States that caused evil that has occurred through neoliberal ideologies and actions. Nonetheless, I found frustrating Beacham's criticizing both US intervention in the past and that they're doing nothing now about the corruption and human rights abuses in these other countries (and not just because it seems that the US continues to do some intervention in other countries, including Honduras). I didn't ask verbally, but I wondered to myself how much Beacham (and thus Answer?) had similar motivations as the imperialist, colonialist, neo-liberals, just instead of doing it for money, he would have wanted to impose his own morals and behavior on these other places. For their own good, of course.
Today, at Women's March Chicago, a friend compared a democratic socialism focused on forming a society through the interests and the guidance of the People against a more Lenin-esque communism following Vanguardism, a revolutionary approach that sees the interest of the Communist Revolutionaries as the only real interest and that anyone disagreeing or blocking the Vanguard Revolutionaries will be crushed.
I kind of have a feeling that Answer might have twinges of Vanguardism.
After hearing the journalist give Beacham the run down, Beacham went off on a tirade about how racist the US is these days, and he kept talking about the importance of striking down racism. I kind of have the feeling that Beacham was using racism a little bit as a buzzword without necessarily having checked his privilege and having a fully understanding of it, especially since he focused a lot on the march co-organized by Answer Chicago that will happen tomorrow, "Shut Down Racism, War & Bigotry on 1st Anniv of Trump". Other organizers include:
I'm not familiar with these two other groups, but they do give cause for second thoughts on the march tomorrow. After the forum last week and some thinking about the presence Beacham had, Answer Chicago has turned me off and made me have little interest in the march tomorrow. I went to the Women's March today instead for very much that reason. I wanted to be around like-minded people that would provide, even if provided by an impersonal mass crowd, some social support and embolden my beliefs in what makes up a good social fabric or at least in my distaste for the current state of the US government and toxic masculinity. Not going tomorrow won't be so much about Answer Chicago, though, it'll be more about having a whole bunch of other things that need doing.
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