Exactly. A Civics Professor I Had In College Had A Lot Of Fun Telling Us How One Of The Most Hated Occupational

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, I agree with you; everyone thinks that their values and groups are sacred and beyond criticism. As a result, we fight over which policies are humanitarian without making sure that we actually agree on what "humanitarianism" is.

My reply to your original post was because it seemed to imply that progressives were/are incapable of acting upon anything but cynical power politics, when something closer to the opposite is true, I think: progressives genuinely support a particular, tribally informed form of humanitarianism that may not represent the country's (let alone humanity's) as a whole. The same holds true for most of the rest of us.

Likewise, I’d be willing to agree to a number of things progressives might want on immigration, but only in such a way that it would utterly ruin any political advantage they were hoping to gain from it.

If the concern is purely humanitarian and not political, they’d agree to the bargain, but of course it never was actually pure.

The local population in countries that export bananas typically eat different varieties grown primarily by small farmers. The ones for the Americans and the Europeans, Cavendish variety bananas, are grown in huge, monoculture plantations that are susceptible to disease. The banana industry consumes more agrichemicals than any other in the world, asides from cotton. Most plantations will spend more on pesticides than on wages. Pesticides are sprayed by plane, 85% of which does not land on the bananas and instead lands on the homes of workers in the surrounding area and seeps into the groundwater. The results are cancers, stillbirths, and dead rivers.

The supermarkets dominate the banana trade and force the price of bananas down. Plantations resolve this issue by intensifying and degrading working conditions. Banana workers will work for up to 14 hours a day in tropical heat, without overtime pay, for 6 days a week. Their wages will not cover their cost of housing, food, and education for their children. On most plantations independent trade unions are, of course, suppressed. Contracts are insecure, or workers are hired through intermediaries, and troublemakers are not invited back.

Who benefits most from this arrangement? The export value of bananas is worth $8bn - the retail value of these bananas is worth $25bn. Here’s a breakdown of who gets what from the sale of banana in the EU.

On average, the banana workers get between 5 and 9% of the total value, while the retailers capture between 36 to 43% of the value. So if you got a bunch of bananas at Tesco (the majority of UK bananas come from Costa Rica) for 95p, 6.65p would go to the banana workers, and 38p would go to Tesco.

Furthermore, when it comes to calculating a country’s GDP (the total sum of the value of economic activity going on in a country, which is used to measure how rich or poor a country is, how fast its economy is ‘growing’ and therefore how valuable their currency is on the world market, how valuable its government bonds, its claim on resources internationally…etc), the worker wages, production, export numbers count towards the country producing the banana, while retail, ripening, tariffs, and shipping & import will count towards the importing country. A country like Costa Rica will participate has to participate in this arrangement as it needs ‘hard’ (i.e. Western) currencies in order to import essential commodities on the world market.

So for the example above of a bunch of Costa Rican bananas sold in a UK supermarket, 20.7p will be added to Costa Rica’s GDP while 74.3p will be added to the UK’s GDP. Therefore, the consumption of a banana in the UK will add more to the UK’s wealth than growing it will to Costa Rica’s. The same holds for Bangladeshi t-shirts, iPhones assembled in China, chocolate made with cocoa from Ghana…it’s the heart of how the capitalism of the ‘developed’ economy functions. Never ending consumption to fuel the appearance of wealth, fuelled by the exploitation of both land and people in the global south.

When it comes to understanding migration, this needs to be taken into account: if you are in a rural area in the global south, like Honduras, you have basically no access to social services, medicine, and education. In fact, the funding for those services is actually being cut, as the social security funds have been looted by corrupt politicans appointed by a military coup. Then you have to factor in that you likely have no access to the land, and no access to credit to buy seeds, and have to sell yourself for basically pennies to an agroindustrial giant. The peasants feed the local people; the agroindustries feed the Americans. In Guatamala, there is a neo-corporate fuedalism where you are allowed a patch of land if you are willing to work, unpaid, for coffee plantations which sell their produce to the German company Ritz. If you attempt to settle unoccupied land, a local businessman will claim it is his without any proof, and the police will take his side because the Agrarian Reform Institute, which issues land titles, is controlled by coupists whose main concern is squeezing as much wealth out of the country as possible. Thugs will murder a man and his wife in broad daylight, and the judge will respond by evicting you and your family from the land.

There is nowhere else for you to go but Tegucigalpa, where you can work trying to wash car windows or selling snacks to passing cars for a handful of lempira a day. Or perhaps you could work for a few dollars a day in one of the maquila factories making textiles for the American and European market, which are set up in special economic zones called Charter Cities where the constitution and labour laws do not apply, which can close down and spirit away whenever they like to another country when they are more willing to sell their people for even less. And then you have to factor in the hurricanes that sweep through the country, destroying everything, that the rains no longer come when they used to but when they do they come in flooding torrents. Much of the north of Honduras is currently underwater; most of the banana and coffee plantations have been destroyed.

And then you factor in when you tried to change this via electing a better government in 2006, he was overthrown in 2009; when you tried to get organised and resist the coup, your friends, your loved ones, your trade union leaders and peasant resisters all turned up mysteriously dead while the military and police worked with drug gangs disguised as agribusiness like the Dinant coproration to burn down villages that opposed them. For trying to change things in the way that you were supposed to, through non violently protesting, organising, and voting for something better, you were subjected to a decade of counterrevolutionary terror and violence that the “international community” not only ignored but gave its active approval to. All of the factors listed above have not only been ongoing for the last 10 years, they’ve been intensified, hothoused by the global counterrevolutionary terror that was the response to the 2011 wave of post-financial crisis uprisings and revolutions and accelerating climate apocalypse.

And at the same time, all of this is being done so more of the country can be turned into a massive cash cow for the benefit of foreign corporations and domestic oligarchs. The wealth of your country is siphoned off and flows around the American and European financial system, benefiting them and building a consumer disneyland that looks like paradise compared to your situation. That could, even if you are worked for nothing, give you a few dollars to send home that could build your abuela in the countryside a nice home for her to live out her days. What other option is left for you and your family other than joining the exodus of people heading north, to the countries where the wealth and profits and rewards of your homeland’s suffering are being kept. And after you cross mountains and rivers which freeze you to death and sweep you away, you are faced with a massive border wall of ahte and soldiers on horses which hit you with sticks. You are faced with an immigration detention centre that will chain you to your bed while you give birth and separate you from your baby who will be given away for adoption to a white couple. When you make a charge against the border fence in Melilla, fed up with being kept in shacks with nothing while the Northerners debate what to do about the problem people their greed has forced to move, the Moroccan police will beat 35 of you to death.

And then when you get there to that golden paradise, you end up doing work not dissimilar to the work you were doing back home, working for pennies (though pennies that are valuable enough back home to buy the family that remain the tiniest slice of comfort) for an agroindustrial giant that supplies supermarkets with cheap produce picked by cheaper people. While you work in the fields, a crop duster plane will spray you with paraquat; when support organisations try to raise this with OSHA they will ask for the plane’s number, and when this can’t be provided they will say nothing can be done. In fact, inspectors are ordered to stay away from the plantations on the Texas border. A member of the Border Agricultural Workers Project says she hasn’t seen a normal child born on the border in 20 years, such is the effect of agrichemicals. If you fuck up in the slightest, have any interaction with the state, you will be deported and sent back to square one. There are a 14 million migrants in the US in the same precarious state, effectively without any way of enforcing their rights. My aunt is a Mexican migrant in California. Her son was deported because he got a speeding ticket. It was 15 years before she saw him again, other than through the bars of the border fence, when she finally got her green card.

The situation in Honduras can be repeated for almost any other country. Syria, Venezuela, Iraq, South Sudan, Libya, all the headline countries are countries that have been subjected to a severe counterrevolutionary terror. The processes of dispossession and destruction of peasant economies and communities (primitive accumulation to use the Marxist jargon) have been hothoused over the last decade by war and violence. I just wish that relatively comfortable people in the imperialist countries realised that the “migrant crisis” is the result of policies that their governments forced on others. Violence that their elites made their fortunes off. What a monstrous, barbarous way of life we have.

Laws against feeding the homeless remind me of a recent conversation I had about the "Nordic model" of prostitution where Johns/customers are arrested but the prostitutes are left unpenalized: it's breathtakingly hypocritical, and the moral contradictions within bourgeois liberalism are evident. Apparently lawmakers believe that a woman is not oppressed when she is forced by circumstance to sell herself on the street to pay for rent and groceries, but only when the proper individual oppressor (a man) buys her services. (What about woman who hire female prostitutes, or male-on-male sex work?) Similarly, a person is not oppressed by homelesness, exposure to the elements, or the likely accompanying drug addiction, mental illness, and despair, but God forbid we violate any hygiene laws while feeding them!

You know what makes me mad? I used to work at Pizza hut and everyday we would have to throw away perfectly good pizza or potato wedges or garlic bread in the bin because it was the wrong order or the customer had changed their mind. They made us bin the whole thing. We weren’t allowed to put it aside to eat from or take it home (we all earned minimum wage so it’s not like we culd afford pizza that expensive a lot). But what makes me even madder is that they could easily give that to the homeless or poor. Like, if a homeless person came into the store, we could have easily given him one of the 20 or so pizzas that we would be binning every single day anyway. Imagine all the pizza hut stores in the world. Imagine each and every one throwing away on average 20 pizzas a day. Imagine how many people that would feed. Fuck corporations man.

I have a knee-jerk disgust reaction to the Tweet, but it's because Israel cannot credibly claim to even value the lives of its own people, so I interpret any claim to the contrary with maximum uncharitability: "If you really wanted to save families, you'd declare a ceasefire. You value your citizens solely to the extent that they can provide cannon fodder or victims to motivate the cannon fodder."

Hey what do you mean the Israeli government is actually harvesting sperm from the corpses of IDF soldiers.

If I were a state run media outlet, you would have to waterboard this out of me. They just fucking tweeted it. Publicly. On Twitter.

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.

Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world’s experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them.

- Iain M Banks, http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

As many of you know, in my day job I’m a journalist, and one of my colleagues is covering the tumblr changes and wants to talk to anyone who has been affected, creatively or financially, by the new policy, so that we can get your story out there. If that’s you, PM me or email her at kaitlyn.tiffany@vox.com. 

Property ownership itself is a system of authority. If you own all the farmland in an area, I have to work on it in order to survive, or I will starve. What gives you the right to control a resource and demand that I subordinate myself to you for my daily bread?

When we abandon cooperation and democracy as a means of conducting economic activity, solving ethical questions, and relating to each other, life becomes nothing more than a nightmarish struggle to death as you have described. Without a system of authority to protect your property rights, who will stop your stronger, smarter neighbor with more friends from taking your property at gunpoint and enslaving your family?

By your own logic, there will always be someone capable of dominating you and willing to do so. You will not survive the world you wish to create.

Kaiser Health News

How Political Maneuvering Derailed A Red State’s Path To Medicaid Expansion

When Kansas elected Laura Kelly as governor, Medicaid expansion looked like a shoo-in, with seemingly broad support across state government.

The impression I have is that while the poor rural voters may want Medicaid, the land/business owners who gerrymander their states to hell and back will stonewall them, as in the article. You can blame the poor for being demoralized, but many of these people also voted for Obama as recently as 2008, so maybe they currently don't have any good local liberal/left candidates to throw their weight behind.

Your stupid villains might be on to something

It’s a genre we hated since it’s inception: the right-thinking reporter descending into some godforsaken poor white corner of rural or rust belt America in order to find out why they won’t vote like the author thinks they should. Unsurprisingly, the author finds character flaws and racism at the heart of the issue. The right finds this condescending, the left doesn’t consider the opinions of the unwashed unworthy absent intersectional demographic cover. Wash, rinse, repeat.

This Monica Potts NYT number fits the bill, right down to borrowing some racial material from someone else’s work to round out all the elements. Potts, a former Arkansan, heads back home after being away for two decades and finds the community both economically decimated and deeply suspicious of any government spending. The article is pegged on the county library, which became the subject of a local controversy when it wanted to offer a raise to a librarian. It’s a neat encapsulation of the perspective of the author: the smart ones (like her) moved away and all that remains is an angry, anti-intellectual rump who views any attempts at improvement as useless taxation.

Potts’ perspective can be challenged in two ways. One of which, she lays out clearly: Van Buren County, where this story takes place, had a natural gas boom during which it spent a relatively large sum of money on a library that it now has trouble paying for, to the point at which the sales tax had to be raised to pay for it. The librarian, though her salary would have been commensurate to her education, was far above the county median. Libraries are good, but not every library expenditure makes sense, especially to a community that just sunk a lot of money it didn’t have into one.

The second one is the Facebook group where the revolt started (see the graphic above). It got a little nutty after the article ran, but scrolling back, you’ll see one conspiracist nutter posting, but mostly it’s unobjectionable community stuff. Most interesting to anyone trying to parse the Times article is a controversy over rising water bills. Dig into the comments and you’ll find that a large water treatment plant was built for a chicken processing plant that has since closed, leaving nobody to pay for it but regular rate-payers, who are watching their bills balloon.

The library and the water bills create a pattern. Due to small populations, rural areas are much more susceptible both to the boom/bust cycle and to white elephant projects that can shred government budgets for years. Van Buren County, unlike these federal government, can’t print more money. It also has few of the fixed, immovable amenities that allows a community to make demands of richer corporations and people. Overspending during booms leads to both real constraints during busts and a “once bitten, twice shy” mentality when it comes to spending.

Urban liberals live with the notion that there is an unlimited pool of money that we could spend to solve all of our problems if we could just claw it away from the rich. The people of Van Buren county disagree.

Very few believers will seriously claim that morality can only come from religion anymore (that argument seemed to die with the religious debates of the early aughts) but they've seemed to switch tactics recently to claiming that culture and religion are inseparable. This strikes me as an even worse argument: arguably, religion *destroys* culture by suppressing full human thought, creativity, and exploration of ideas- often other religions!

Once again begging anti-theists to realize that to get to a world without religion you’d have to commit cultural genocide. So maybe you shouldn’t push for that