obscenity

I just watched a crowd of people jeering at a man who said he was ill with Parkinsons. The mob facing this man, who was sitting on the ground, yelled at him about handouts. One man lectured him, saying "If you're looking for a handout, you're on the wrong end of town. There's nothing for free over here, you have to work for everything you get." Another tossed money at him as he sat holding a sign saying he needs help.

Is this truly what we have become in this country? Have we actually come to a place where such callousness and brutality against our fellow citizens is accepted and cheered? What has happened to us here?

I encountered this obscenity having just come back from a short visit with my father. He is 92 now, increasingly weak, very frail. He is pale, unsteady on his feet, and his memory has deteriorated dramatically in the last few months. My precious daddy is finally, truly old, and I don't think he'll be with us much longer.

My father is ill. He needs help, he does. He is blessed to have social security and Medicare, bank accounts, plus a supplemental health care policy, thanks to good fortune in education, work, talent, and being able to save a little money. Despite a lifetime of saving, though, his financial situation is worrisome. Last year, some thieves at Lehman Brothers waltzed away with a sizeable chunk of the money he worked a lifetime to accumulate.

I picture my father sitting on the ground in the condition he's in, holding a sign saying "I'm elderly, weak, and sick. I need help," while people mock him for his frailty. I see my husband, who was so desperately ill for four long years early in this godforsaken century: sweet Mike, 120 pounds of him, skeletal, wasting, so close to death. I imagine people scoffing at him for his weakness, for having become sick, as if it could not happen to any one of us.

On the way back from Ponca City, we passed workmen on the road, and a work truck flying a big American flag. I realized when I saw it that I have grown ashamed of my country. I am ashamed to live in a place where compassion is derided. I am disgusted to belong to a nation so insistent that our values are Christian, where so many who claim Christ use the Bible as a weapon. I am apalled when people boast of American exceptionalism while condemning and ridiculing those in need.

Maybe it's my frame of mind today. It's gray again, and cold. I've spent a couple of hours sitting across the table from my failing father, and I've watched my fellow Americans angrily jeering a man who says he is sick, mocking his weakness, his need. I've seen the red, white, and blue of my country's flag blowing in the wind and I wonder if it means anything at all anymore.

US exports misery and death: the failure of capitalism

The US has done more to create the current worldwide food crisis than any other nation. It is an outrage and one more reason why I find myself feeling ashamed of my country. This purported free market, the darling of right wingers everywhere, is supposed to save the world. But freedom is only free for the ultra rich and the biggest multinational corporations which line their pockets with government subsidies. The very, very few reap rich benefits from government policies and the actions of the IMF and the World Bank, while destroying entire cultures and indenturing the developing world. And now starving it. Profit over life. What a fucking shame.

In 1995, as a condition of providing a desperately needed loan, the International Monetary Fund required Haiti to cut its tariff on imported rice from 35% to 3%, the lowest in the Caribbean. The result was a massive influx of U.S. rice that sold for half the price of Haitian-grown rice. Thousands of rice farmers lost their lands and livelihoods, and today three-quarters of the rice eaten in Haiti comes from the U.S.[6]

U.S. rice didn’t take over the Haitian market because it tastes better, or because U.S. rice growers are more efficient. It won out because rice exports are heavily subsidized by the U.S. government. In 2003, U.S. rice growers received $1.7 billion in government subsidies, an average of $232 per hectare of rice grown.[7] That money, most of which went to a handful of very large landowners and agribusiness corporations, allowed U.S. exporters to sell rice at 30% to 50% below their real production costs.

In short, Haiti was forced to abandon government protection of domestic agriculture – and the U.S. then used its government protection schemes to take over the market.

There have been many variations on this theme, with rich countries of the north imposing “liberalization” policies on poor and debt-ridden southern countries and then taking advantage of that liberalization to capture the market. Government subsidies account for 30% of farm revenue in the world’s 30 richest countries, a total of US$280 billion a year,[8] an unbeatable advantage in a “free” market where the rich write the rules.

The global food trade game is rigged, and the poor have been left with reduced crops and no protections.

In addition, for several decades the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have refused to advance loans to poor countries unless they agree to “Structural Adjustment Programs” (SAP) that require the loan recipients to devalue their currencies, cut taxes, privatize utilities, and reduce or eliminate support programs for farmers.

All this was done with the promise that the market would produce economic growth and prosperity – instead, poverty increased and support for agriculture was eliminated.

The Food Crisis and the Failure of the Capitalist Model.

what i hate about america

I am patriotic and I love my country, but I hate most of what has happened to it in the last seven years. I don't drink Kool-aid and I can't stomach the rah-rah destructive crap that has passed for patriotism in this country since 9/11. I never believed in this war, not for a minute, and I was attacked for it by the gung-ho boot-in-your ass don't-fuck-with-the-yooo-esssss-aye crowd that has controlled the public discourse for far too fucking long, led on by the most incompetent, most ignorant, most destructive, most shameful president ever. Ever.

So when I came across this piece at The Agonist, it had a profound effect on me. I have never believed that we are invincible in this country or that we are special and thus deserving of special treatment, special rights, that the rules of good world citizenship don't apply to us. There's a tragic irony in the fact that we helped set up the rules of good world citizenship, yet we've shrugged off those restraints and discarded them as if they mean nothing.

I don't discount that we can be pretty kickass in a lot of ways, creative and innovative, generous and high spirited and just good fun. But our aggressive, bellicose posturing when it comes to foreign affairs has always offended me deeply, and the grotesque bullying arrogance that has passed for foreign policy since 9/11 is a horror and makes me ashamed of my country.

Because I am still a product of my raising, I have to confess that I was aware of this, of the impact of war around the world, but vaguely. To see the actual numbers was deeply disturbing. In general, in this country, we tend not to try to see things from the viewpoint of others. That's considered a weakness which we attribute to liberals, commies and misguided socialists. So when France was not on board with Iraq, we poked fun at the weaklings and we renamed our fried potatoes and I was inundated with emails from strangers chastising me for selling French antiques.

But it's true that we have little context in this country for the bloody reality of war. War is hell for everyone, but it's a special kind of hell when it's fought where you live. That's not our experience here, and so it is, perhaps, a bit easier to be somewhat cavalier about the next war and the next one. For all of our tough and hawkish posturing, we've never suffered the kinds of losses that other countries have. Not even close.

In World War I the US suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the UK, France, and Germany the figures are respectively 885,000, 1.4 million, and over 2 million. In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., records the deaths of 58,195 Americans over the course of a war lasting fifteen years: but the French army lost double that number in six weeks of fighting in May–June 1940. In the US Army's costliest engagement of the century—the Ardennes offensive of December 1944–January 1945 (the "Battle of the Bulge")—19,300 American soldiers were killed. In the first twenty-four hours of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916), the British army lost more than 20,000 dead. At the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army lost 750,000 men and the Wehrmacht almost as many.

With the exception of the generation of men who fought in World War II, the United States thus has no modern memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries. But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead. In continental Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians. Yugoslavia recorded over half a million civilian deaths, Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million. These aggregate figures include some 5.8 million Jewish dead. Further afield, in China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.

As The Agonist's Sean-Paul Kelly writes, "We don't even begin to comprehend what suffering war causes."