What’s Going On?
Mark Cramer (author of Old Man on a Green Bike and Urban Everesting)
“We’ve got to find a way to bring some understanding here today”
Marvin Gaye
In attempting to understand the protests and violence engulfing the USA, I suggest we look at four specific issues:
- Inequality: Perceiving Is Believing
- Protecting Inequality: Bad Police Are a Symptom, Not a Cause
- Elementary Looting 101: Ignoring Pompitudes and Reversing Anti-Protest Spin
- Advanced Looting 201: Contact Tracing to Find the Source of the Contagion
Inequality: Perceiving Is Believing
“Brother brother brother, there’s too many of you dying”
Marvin Gaye
According to a 2018 survey, Americans perceived black wealth as 80% of that of whites. But the US Census Bureau reveals black wealth to be only about 9% of that of whites. The discrepancy between objective reality and whites’ perceptions of blacks influences how Americans view the insurrectional aftermath of George Floyd’s murder-lynching by four Minneapolis policemen.
Covid-19 demonstrated the inequality in many black and brown communities, where residents living in unhealthy food deserts near waste-removal sites are more likely to become fatalities.
To quantify inequality, let’s turn to an organization known to be pretty good with numbers, the World Bank. It ranks inequality using the “Gini Coefficient,” in which zero represents complete equality and the highest numbers reflect the most inequality.
- Scandinavian countries do best: Sweden scores a 28.8 and Norway earns a 27.
- France, “hosting” an entire year of Yellow Vest demonstrations fighting inequality, receives a 31.6. Vandals muscling into Yellow Vest marches can also be seen on the fringes of today’s anti-racist marches across the USA. France’s inequality statistic is flattering when compared the USA’s 41.5.
- Sudan (34.2), after a successful democratic revolution, and Vietnam (35.7), a nation obliterated five decades ago by the US military-industrial complex, both ranked better than the USA.
That the USA hasn’t had a Yellow Vest type insurrection is testimony that the victims of American inequality have shown stoic restraint. Until now.
Protecting Inequality: Bad Police Are a Symptom, Not a Cause
“Picket lines and picket signs, don’t punish me with brutality”
Marvin Gaye
In French social movements I’ve often witnessed the casseurs (“breakers”) smashing bank windows and torching cars. At times, the police treated us, the pacifists, as if we were the provocateurs, fencing us in so that we couldn’t escape their teargas. Yes, gassing us! Sometimes outmaneuvered police had to flee the masked casseurs, in tactical retreat.
One afternoon the casseurs sprung upon our march from a side street and the police came from out of nowhere to stop them. Sometimes they gassed us and sometimes they saved us.
Years ago, I was arrested in an anti-racist sit-in in Chicago. The cop was a former student of mine, Richard S. I’d invested hours of office time helping him understand Cervantes.
“I’m sorry I have to do this, Mr. Cramer,” he said, as he clicked on the cuffs. I felt sorrier for HIM. He was embarking on the impossible mission of protecting a failed system.
From my cell in the Racine Avenue lockup, I witnessed a horrific beating. The cops became enraged by the screams of a chubby mentally ill Latino man. To silence him, they banged his head against the corner of a wooden table. Instantly, I became an advocate for the mentally ill.
Two years ago French protesters blocked the Champs-Elysées to oppose the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. When the demonstration ended, the police barricaded us in. Their orders? We couldn’t leave until President Macron and Netanyahu had finished their mousse au chocolat. To relieve the boredom, I struck up a conversation with the cops, not known for their chattiness.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” one of them said. “I understand your cause. It’s a shame how the Palestinians are suffering. I’m just following orders.”
Experiments in reforming the police often involve putting good apples into a bad system and ending up with rotten apples. But images of American police in many cities joining and embracing demonstrators contradicts the cliché.
Elementary Looting 101: Ignoring Pompitudes and Reversing the Anti-Protest Spin
Mike Pompeo, former head of the CIA (the agency known for lying about WMDs), pontificates about broken windows. Without a shred of evidence, he names Antifa as the provoker of street insurgency. But he applauds the violent Boston Tea Party.
Meanwhile, seeing the looters on TV, Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice tweeted, “This is right out of the Russian playbook.”
Tell me your ideology and I can tell you who you’ll blame for the looting. Was Pompeo aware that Twitter suspended a fake Antifa account that was tied to a white supremacist group?
Rice, shrinking the value of her Ph.D, cries “Russia did it!”
On one beautiful Saturday afternoon in Paris, I marched with 10,000 climate activists, including contingents of Yellow Vests. Not a single act of vandalism.
On the other side of the city, Champs-Elysées, the casseurs were ruining a separate Yellow Vest protest of 2,000 participants. I returned home to see the TV coverage: wall-to-wall shattered windows and pitched battles between masked men and militarized police. Our massive and convivial demonstration was ignored.
After a year of guessing who’s behind the vandalism, French media still has no real answer. Instead of guessing, American reporters should find some stone-throwers and talk to them.
As a reporter in Barcelona, I once interviewed a leather-jacketed marcher among window bashers. He had defaced a real estate agency wall with spray-can graffiti during a fair-housing demonstration. He took control of the interview, asking me:
“Do you pay rent?
“Yes, I do.”
“Then you’re part of the problem. You’re an accomplice.”
I later visited his residence, a condemned building occupied by squatters. How many of today’s rainbow coalition of demonstrators cannot afford the skyrocketing rents?
Advanced Looting 201: Contact Tracing to Find the Source of the Contagion
Arrest looters and shooters? Sure. Struggling small business owners have been devastated by them. Some bad people are hurting other good people, in the name of what?
But we should also arrest the big-time predatory looters. Maybe start with Trump cabinet members Steve Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross, who, according to The Nation, “led companies that committed fraud to foreclose on millions of homeowners.” (See The Nation “Wilbur Ross and Steve Mnuchin: Profiteers of the Great Foreclosure Machine-Go to Washington,” November 30, 2016.)
While our economy tanks, stocks soar. Which politicians voted to pour trillions into the financial markets? Who are their donors?
Barack Obama was remarkably honest at times in his book The Audacity of Hope: “I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met.”
Our political system needs “contact tracing.” Quarantine the big donors.
With blacks unfairly targeted by predatory lenders, “the resulting economic downturn has adversely affected them to a much greater degree than white homeowners,” according to an ACLU study, as outlined in The Guardian.
For sane discussion, both Republicans and Democrats must accept the blame, as conduits for violent inequality, having showered corporations with massive tax breaks, while leaving distressed Americans to fend for themselves. But the inflamer-in-chief, entangled in his internal white-supremacist wiring, is incapable of leading any discussion that would require a spark of empathy.
The great public intellectual, Cornel West calls America “a failed social experiment.” He adds: “The Black Lives Matter movement emerged under a black president, a black attorney general and black Homeland Security, and they couldn’t deliver.”
West calls for a non-violent revolution: “the democratic sharing of power, resources, wealth and respect.”
Epilogue: Dr. West has been inspired by Marvin Gaye, so we end with “What’s Going On?”
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