Lemonade

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

For the last ten days, an ill wind has been blowing across these United States. Early in the week, over a dozen people died in tornadoes in the Midwest. Here in the Pea Patch, we were on alert for three full days, although we’re too small a spot in the road to have warning sirens; the closest little town, five miles away, had a siren but decided last year it could no longer afford to maintain it.

By Friday, the wind had swept through the South and taken close to 300 souls with it. Now much of the nation is poised on flooding, levees are failing, and dams are ready to burst at the seams. And all this at a time when public services are quickly disappearing, first responders are understaffed and underfunded, and the dollars normally stuffed into collection cans have dwindled to pocket change. If disaster capitalism is the fine art of making money out of human misery, business should be booming.

Capitalism, seems to me, is a kind of codified opportunism. It’s making the most of what you have, ‘capitalizing’ upon what is at hand. It’s an enterprising kid with a lemon tree who starts a lemonade stand. If his cousin has a lemon tree too, they might start a family business, but you can sell just so much lemonade in the neighborhood before you have to export if you want to grow.

We used to call that the American dream, but in the last few decades, those kids grew way too big for their britches; once they got a monopoly on lemon trees, they exported the jobs overseas. Now nobody in the old neighborhood can afford lemonade — and those kids don’t give a tinker’s damn.

America’s big corporations are no longer American, they’re international. They finance their payrolls and production far from home and feel no compunction to feed the home fires with their tax buck, to stem the loss of revenue that has brought us low. They produce overseas, sell overseas, and bank in the Cayman’s. We don’t make stuff anymore, we hawk ideas. Between banking, insurance and speculation, we’re left to push paper; we market our intellectual capital and services, little else. Unfortunately, we haven’t invested in the educational facilities that might keep that product sharp and competitive well into the future, and the very small group of people — likely Ayn Rand admirers — who have the most and call the tune don’t care. We’re quickly becoming the Administrative Assistant of nations, useful to keep things running smoothly but no longer a driving economic force. China is an estimated four years from taking the lead, and nobody seems to care. Where are the NeoCons, screaming for their toppling empire? Where are the Christocrats, decrying godless Communism? As goes WalMart, so goes the world?

Our current system is predatory capitalism, and it’s myopic. It gobbles what’s in its path, exploiting whatever it gets near. We exploited what was at hand for a few decades too many, and now we’re sucking off the bones of the host, taking advantage of the disaster-shocked and devastated.

Disaster capitalism is not only counter-intuitive but tempts us to make a situation worse in order to gain from it. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina stands as an example: New Orleans is rebuilt now with fewer dark faces or welfare obligations, its restored neighborhoods slowly filling with houses prior residents can not afford. Gone are the flavor and flare of a demographic no longer wanted in a city rebuilt for the mostly-white and mostly-moneyed.

We’ve become accustomed to bad news creating some boon in investment for the wealthy. It no longer shocks us, but it should. The continuing pain of a distressed middle-class is not even a blip on the radar for the rich or the corporate party that services their needs, yet we still don’t connect those dots to capitalism gone rogue. For instance, most Americans think the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is an entity dedicated to the business stability of the general public; in reality it is the largest lobbying group in the nation, spending five times that of its closest competitor to stump for the elimination of citizen-protections. Elizabeth Warren recently aired her concerns to Jon Stewart that those on the right were trying to kill off her Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before it accomplished a single thing to help the middle class.

In this kind of class war, you’d think the outcome of the 2012 election would depend on the hijinks of the various politicians, but you’d be wrong. It won’t turn on gay questions or flag pins either. If there’s anything that will create a one-term president, it’s recession. Recession is composed of two successive quarters of falling economic activity. The U.S. hasn’t been in a recession for almost two years, but for obvious reasons, nearly a quarter of the population thinks we’re still in one. Ours has been a jobless recovery, and the cost of gas is a major pinch when people are already choosing between rent or eating. This adds an extra level of challenge and stress for those just keeping their head above water.

Look at Jimmy Carter, look at Poppy Bush. Both lost the good will of the American people because of the economy, and neither could do much about it. Presidents aren’t superhuman. They’re locked in to the system they were hired to work within, as is Obama. There’s only so much he can do about unemployment, and just as little to influence gas prices. Big-mouthed Donald Trump said Obama should just call OPEC and straighten them out (big mouth, four bankruptcies, narcissistic personality, not much else.) What is drawn from wells in the Middle-east does not arrive at our gas pumps without first being massaged by dozens of parasites taking their cut. By the time it gets to us the price has been hugely inflated, like Trump’s ego.

And who can witness the skyrocketing prices at the gas pump without connecting the dots to news that Exxon will report an extra 1.5 billion in profit this quarter, a 69% boost? Exxon is joined by several others in announcing a profit bump, including Shell, ConocoPhillips and — cough, cough — British Petroleum. The CEO of Exxon grabbed a box of salt to throw on the firestorm of public disapproval by pleading that his profit margin has nothing to do with escalating gas prices. Meanwhile, Obama has called for scrutiny of gas pricing and an end to some $4 billion in tax credits and subsidies to Big Oil.

For reasons no one can quite fathom, especially his fellow Republicans who voted to prop up that money exchange as recently as March, House Majority Leader John Bohner agreed with the president; more likely than not in the context of a revised tax code, but too late to clarify now. The game is on, the Democrats scrambling to get a proposal into place, with Harry Reid signaling full support of the Senate. If you like the sound of that, add your name to this Credo petition urging your legislator to end oil subsidies. The recent budget compromise eliminated green options that environmentalists were counting on; eliminating billions in corporate welfare would put that money back on the table for clean energy development. At the very least, this will put the topic of outlandish profit front and center in the mind of a public no longer indifferent about CEO salaries or Wall Street bonuses.

When the winds came last week, we weren’t really surprised. We expect weather extremes now just as we expect corporate exploitation, and we’ve developed an ear for lies, for liars and for propaganda. The American people have become accustomed to shocks and kicks, we’ve been served up lemons since the turn of the century, and we know how to make our own lemonade. It’s taken us this long to get over the fear of being afraid; it’s taken us this long to finally say, “enough.”

The Tea Party contingent of the Republican Congress plans to deny America a budget in the coming weeks; it doesn’t care if we lose our financial edge or our standing in the world, or cause global destabilization. Across the nation, Republican governors are behaving like dictators, furthering a radical agenda while they have the chance. As the Baggers seek to drown the last of government in the bathtub, we need to keep our wits about us, to speak out against exploitation and make ourselves heard. Our government is still in danger of being bought by the highest bidder. It’s up to us to see to it that never happens.