**This is a long read. My sources are at the bottom. I haven’t really organized them, but you can look if you’d like. **
My friend and I had a long conversation about the events happening right now. He, as a newfound minority-literally he found out within the past year his biological dad was of Latino/Mexican descent-was living his life seemingly unaware that these things plagued society so bad. Or that he didn’t realize the descent into madness we’ve been accustomed to in our lives. “I need to make myself more aware” he said solemnly.
Me, as a card carrying minority, and having faced racism all my life because of my skin color, haircut, and other general ethic features, replied back, “It’s not about racism.”
Because…it’s not, just yet, give me a moment to expound. And I’m going to stay away from race for right now, so bear with me. The immediate problem we face right now, is police brutality. Protesters are peacefully protesting, and police are responding by tear gassing, beating and arresting. It’s not because they’re black (mostly). They are-but the bigger point is that the protesters challenge their authority. The real problem, deep down, is that they are corrupt, and they are bullies, and are responding with the only way they know how. They flex their authority that has been taught to them, because it gains them things. Civil forfeiture gains police forces millions of dollars every year*. Debtors prisons are illegal, but that hasn’t stopped judges from sending children to work camps and getting plenty of kickbacks in the process*. We have the largest prison complex, and nowhere near the population that supports the kind of numbers for evidence*. And the companies that run those “for profit” prisons get free labor. It’s actually unfathomable to me that we have something called a for-profit prison. It’s a win-win for just about everyone making money, except the people that get screwed by the system, and constantly run over until they’re faced with life choices that they have to accept. Dead end jobs because no one will hire them, and forced into a life of poverty, stripped of their rights as citizens. Snoop Dogg even said he didn’t realize he could vote due to his record in the past*. Police immunity protects police officers from knowing the law-look that up that’s literally their job-and also from suffering the consequences of their actions. That means that they are immune to just about any action they’d like to do, and they have shown that they take advantage of it time and again. In what sane world does a swat team need to throw a grenade into a baby’s crib?* With all our money and technology, what makes it necessary to breakdown a door and shoot someone innocent immediately without provocation? That sounds more like an assassination to me.
So the solution is to fix the corruption. First with the police, and then you start with the next one, in a moment. When you fix the corruption behind the problem, you will find that it helps the other aspects of life. We’ve dirtied our waters, both literally and physically, and allowed the corruption to seep through most of our aspects and ways of life. It’s not a conspiracy theory anymore. You can literally trace the lines and see how the most powerful have created a system to weaken people-minorities, subgroups, keep them marginalized, and it’s all for money, and power. When you hold police responsible, financially and criminally, you’ll get police who stay within the lines. I don’t recall any actions where the police needed to go outside those lines to protect people. I certainly recall plenty of times police have gone outside those lines to specifically hurt people.
And then the corruption of the next step, which is going to be incredibly hard. Fixing the problem of economic disparity. You may have heard of Reagan’s “trickle down” economic theory, but you definitely didn’t pay attention to the end results. It’s probably because it was done on purpose, but with the deregulation of commodities and the stock markets, we gave companies a free run to become wealthier. “Well, what’s so bad about that? Isn’t that the point of capitalism??!” You may say. “Capitalism is as American as apple pie!”. Well, that’s true, but the end result is exactly what the government is for. The government regulates the businesses so that they’re not taking advantage of people and labor, so that they pay their fair share of taxes, so that they’re not dumping nasty chemicals in our water in the name of money or saving money. Welp, deregulating commodities is about a worse as it can get. That’s why tankers sit in the ocean, full of oil. Because instead of keeping it on the market, traders are literally keeping it away from the market until they can pump up the price or create artificial demand. That’s not so bad if it’s diamonds, where you don’t need to buy it to survive. But it’s terrible if it’s something that people truly need, and being done in order to save a buck (Hint, gas, food, etc).
BUT THAT’S NOT ALL I say in my cheesy announcer voice. Besides the deregulation of the stock market, it’s also the deregulation of the tax industry. Apple, if not number 1, it’s jockeying for number 2 spot as the world’s richest company-has close to $300 BILLION dollars in cash reserves and yet pays a paltry sum while hiding money in offshore reserves and loopholes*. GE claims that it supports raising taxes due to our outdated system, but still doesn’t defend that it had a -4.5% tax rate of $400 million dollars. That means we either paid them or they got some nice rebates. Look up what Amazon pays right now. Go ahead, I’ll wait. It’s not Regan’s fault, but it began with him, and has continued to spiral until it’s out of control. You wonder why your roads are bad, and yet your city or county continues to fight over money to fix it? Schools have lunch debt. How is that even a thing? Have I asked that question enough? Whew…
You hear stories, and maybe this is what Trump is talking about when he says “Make America Great Again”. Maybe it was the idyllic life where one man working in a factory could afford to buy a home, 2 cars, keep his wife at home, and send his two kids to college. I think Martin Luther King, Jr. was marching then too but you know, maybe he was the unlucky one or something? (Sarcasm). But say it was perfect in that supposedly wonderful time that was your grandfather’s time, and since then we’ve been squeezed so much that it takes 2 people working full time in a home to pay the bills week to week. Never mind the cars, house or sending kids to college. All of grandpappy’s halcyon days are over, because he decided to take them with him, therefore draining the pool of the next generation to come. These companies are draining the lifeblood of America, while sending thoughts and prayers but very paltry sums back in comparison.
Because the new slaves are Chinese. And they make very little compared to the average American, but this is the part where we talk about fixing racism. The phone you hold in your hand could have cost someone their life on the other side of the world, but that’s ok because you don’t see it. You pay the massive price for it because it might be worth it, and the dollars that go to the people that made it certainly don’t “trickle down” from the company, the workers see pennies. They even have nets to prevent the workers from killing themselves from working too hard. They’d rather have the workers kill themselves at home and “Not on company property, it’s bad PR”*. But here’s the racist part. Those Chinese workers used to be black. They used to be the black machine, that picked cotton, provided wonderous amounts of labor, and were the cause of a civil war in this country. The value of slave labor is completely underestimated in the sense that it accomplished and created mass amounts of wealth in this country. Fighting over taxes and wealth is what this country was founded on. Disrupting that created a hole that then used those same disparaged workers as scapegoats. And if it wasn’t black peoples with goods, it’s Asians with railroads, Mexicans with labor now, and probably would have been Indians had they not been killed by disease. The Indians lost their land-one of the most valuable things they could have had, had they totally believed in the concept of owning it. Life, liberty and the pursuit of Happiness! It was actually “property”, but you can look that one up too. This is AMERICA! (TM/Restricted/Copyrighted), Land of the Free. It’s been in constant turmoil since it’s founding, and the labor that it used to make itself rich was black. So, once they freed the slaves, then they should have had a fighting chance, right? They’ve had how many hundreds of years to make themselves wealthy like the rest of us??( Sarcasm again)
Welp, buckle up, ‘cause here’s some more shattering truth. Like the Tulsa massacre/Black Wall Street, there have been plenty of instances where Black Americans have made something of themselves. But it’s been taken away and shattered time and again due to wealth disparity, racism and hatred. It’s not a conspiracy to say that people of color have had their communities unfairly target by drug trafficking-George Bush Senior was the head of the CIA when it began importing and selling drugs to the American people-IT’S OWN PEOPLE-in order to create secret slush funds. This is all documented, it’s even in a movie by heartthrob Tom Cruise! But Bush Sr. was selling those drugs directly to Black America, in order to get them addicted and destroy their community. (Then we elected him President) Why? Because it was poor and marginalized, and they were the best targets to get addicted to the drugs in the first place. So not only was Black America kept purposely poor, put in ghettos and targeted for drugs that were destroying communities and they were more likely to become addicted to, they still provided much of the working labor and capital by occupying the lowest professions-with terrible wages and pay. Martin Luther King’s speech is remembered for having a dream of racial equality. Once he started calling for wealth equality, his days were numbered. Look that factoid up, because that’s the exact reason he was targeted. Not only did the FBI have documents and troves of data on him (to blackmail as well), but they REALLY became unhappy when he started to point to the reason why Black America has been held down for so long. “Those uppity Blacks are gonna take OUR JOBS!!” (1964 version has since been replaced by the Mexican labor edition of 2014)
In the years since, they’ve been replaced by an even cheaper workforce, one that’s easy to squeeze and won’t try to fight back because they haven’t been indoctrinated with the American ZEAL (again copyrighted, TM, restricted, etc). And that leaves the Black people left with very little professions to turn to. We’ve allowed and pushed companies to go cheaper, and in response, they go as cheap as they can-to another country, taking jobs, wages, taxes, labor and just about everything else they can squeeze out the back door. And if a black person won’t do it, maybe a Mexican will? And if they don’t, a Chinese person or Indian person definitely will. Someone always lines up for the trickle…and it’s probably a golden trickle too, but not the good kind.
America is the richest country in the world. The number 2 economy has 3 times the amount of people. And yet every day we hear stories of how people are starving, homeless, don’t have health insurance, are struggling to make it, and other things that are and should be incredibly to hear in our society. Because there are clear lines between the rich and the poor, and that’s what the problem truly is. Jeff Bezos has 150 Billion dollars. That’s plenty to be sure, and he’s allowed to earn it. But there’s a point that by taxing him appropriately, he should have contributed his fair share-not the share that his accountants have found for him, but his FAIR share. I don’t want all his money. I don’t want even a tiny portion of it. I don’t want it at all. What I want is for people to be happy, healthy, and have the ability to stress less-all of which is capable by putting those tax dollars to good use and building roads, providing health care, and creating civic innovations that employ people to do good. Americans have accepted that fighting over the scraps that trickle down is acceptable to what they have-when they should stop and think of what the right thing truly is.
Which brings me to my final solution. Overhaul the government. The people in control of the government have been there way too long. They are entrenched, they are part of the system and the ones holding the keys and creating the problems. Some have said that the protests have gone too far with looting and rioting. I say they have not gone far enough, not if you want to count what they have looted from the people, which is more than just money. If you want true change, you need to change the machine, and the real problem is the economic machine. This begins with the government regulating and controlling the way these companies do business with back door handshakes and the revolving door of executives and lawyers that don’t truly represent people going from head of company to head of policy maker in the government. Well, my mistake, the courts have ruled that companies are technically “people” so never mind*. Change that system and you might have people who can truly become happy. Maybe make the minimum wages rise in line with the cost of inflation for once in the past 30 years, and you might have a populace that has the ability to be happy.
You have less problems, and definitely less animosity when everyone is happy, healthy, and has the ability to pay their bills. There’s no more, “I need to get mine” when everyone has a piece. So at that point, you can truly begin educating people on racism, keeping cooler heads, and the ability to prevail. Because when people are less focused on purely survival, they open up with the ability to enrich their lives and the lives of others in many different ways. Dr. King even mentioned guaranteed income in his speeches as a way to abolish poverty…
If the government even knew what they were doing, they would have made sure citizens had a little bit more money in their pocket. You think people who were sitting at home, with nothing to do, less jobs than ever, barely half a month’s worth of rent in their pocket and crushing limitations on movement and food were unhappy or ready to protest? (I don’t see Canadians anywhere. Oh, that’s right they got 8k from their government so far) You think they’re just complaining about black people and police treatment now? The complaint has been a slow burn, and the pandemic has provided dry fuel.
Floyd is the straw that broke the camel’s back. But the true irony is that it should never have been there in the first place. It completely dishonors the fact that Dr. King marched in the first place. He marched and died for equality, just so we could do it again a short lifetime later? We should all be ashamed that it even came close to the notion of this, and therefore, ashamed of the people who represent us and allowed this to happen. Ashamed that you are part of this system and you are doing nothing to fix this. Protesting is fine, but you have seen the results firsthand of the evidence that is given. Police are just “following orders” pushing down an old man and leaving him bleeding on the sidewalk- just like the Nazis claimed while escorting people to their death in Nuremberg. The government is truly a cesspool, and the people need to take it back in order to have it truly represent them, and not just moneyed interests.
I see people protest haircuts and dining out, but I see nobody addressing the fact that habeas corpus has been suspended. Where are the gun rights people lining up to provide a show of force to the government that it has stepped too far? Not even for Black American rights, but just to show that this is wrong, we’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore?
This is a revolution, and it’s completely necessary to make our lives better for what we truly aspire to be. The work is yet to come. This is the only solution needed, and if we don’t reach it, then it will have all been for naught. Because after the people have calmed down, after the fires have stopped burning, what will have been truly accomplished? What did Dr. King accomplish if we repeat history all over again?
When has America been great? We still have hope…
https://theintercept.com/2018/12/07/george-h-w-bush-iran-contra/
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP99-01448R000401580044-3.pdf
https://communities.nysba.org/blogs/hubert-g-plummer-esq/2020/06/05/new-york-suspends-habeas-corpus
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/canada-to-pay-can-2-000-monthly-to-those-out-of-work/1779497
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States
https://www.thebalance.com/universal-basic-income-4160668
https://people.com/music/snoop-dogg-to-vote-for-first-time-2020/