2.11.16

When Despair for the World Grows in Me

The American government does not exist to protect the interests of the American people. It exists to protect the interests of American corporations. In theory, this could transfer benefits to the people, but historically, that doesn't seem to be the case.

I mention this, because I was thinking about US foreign policy and the prison system. Not necessarily related, except for a few points. Intervention/invasion in Iraq and Afghanistan was not for my sake. Certainly, 9/11 provided a convenient, symbolic rallying point for massive public support for those actions, but I can't say that I feel any more secure or less likely to suffer from a terrorist attack as a result of them. Furthermore, that all comes at the expense of the security of vulnerable civilians whose entire lives have been disrupted for over a decade and who can be targets of drone attacks for the simple crimes of proximity or being male and in the wrong age bracket.

What's being protected are economic interests. Keep the petroleum flowing. Ensure access to valuable mining operations that feed metals into the ever-ravenous maw of developing technology.

Do I benefit from those? Tangentially. I'm not spending $5 per gallon for gas. I have a relatively new iPhone, a MacBook, etc.

But am I actually benefitting from those? Or have my tastes and needs been conveniently adapted to suit what's available? Am I being regularly molded as a consumer toward a particular company's vision of the world and an acceptance of and desire for its products?

I just think that the sense of inevitability--that obviously we must have oil, that obviously we must have cheap labor because otherwise I have to pay more than $10 for my t-shirts, that obviously...--it's an illusion that directs our attention away from contemplating alternatives. What could life be like if we didn't...?

Alternatives, for example, to killing innocent people so that multibillion dollar corporations can continue to churn out profits for their shareholders, profits that are converted into financial speculations or carefully protected from taxation by the elaborate machinations of very good accountants taking advantage of loopholes that ostensibly don't exist to enable them to do what they're doing, but that nobody is closing, because the people who could close them are probably benefitting from the system that's in place.

This has been a bit of a ramble, and maybe a paranoid one. But what kills me about all of the candidates that are on the table right now is that every last one of them, at the end of the day, doesn't give a shit about social policies once they've stepped off their political grandstands. They'll pander to the electorate for one more week of my-god-why-do-we-have-to-listen-to-this political campaigning, and then they'll go right back to doing what they do best: protecting American businesses, at home and abroad.

Meanwhile, African American men are incarcerated at alarming rates and essentially stripped of their citizenship, while older white men far from the East and West coast megalopolises are unable to compete for skilled jobs. Women's reproductive rights, so closely tied to their progress socially, politically, and economically, are being chiseled away, because what we clearly need is a return to a world in which falling down the stairs while pregnant could get you convicted of feticide (don't even get me started on this one).

I'm not keen on this world they're protecting. And I don't like the solutions they're offering. It's like intentionally generating pollution, then having the state supply us with asthma medication to cure what wouldn't be an issue if the cause of the asthma was removed in the first place.

...That's all she wrote.

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