Our History

Recently the President traveled to Virginia to commemorate the Jamestown settlement and the first legislative meeting held there in 1619. He was celebrating 400 years of democracy on this continent, that 400 years earlier the first legislative meeting was held in the Jamestown colony.

The first English settlers had reached Jamestown about 10 years earlier. Most of them had been gentlemen unused to working the land or doing much of anything else for themselves. They were accustomed to having others – laborers and servants – do the work of maintaining them. One part of the workforce in the new colony consisted of what were known as "indentured servants." These were impoverished English people, some of them petty criminals, who were offered a choice between going to prison or shipping out to the colonies in the New World. Indentured servants served without getting paid from 7 to 10 or more years to pay for their passage and their food and clothing. After serving that time they would be free and be given a piece of land to farm for themselves.

The other part of the workforce consisted of black Africans who were bound for Bermuda on a slave ship that pirates captured and unloaded in Jamestown.

For the first 50 years the White indentured English and Black Africans lived and worked side-by-side (and sometimes married) pretty much under the same conditions as indentured servants. By 1660 legislation passed by the new legislative assembly-- so recently celebrated by our current president-- imposed on the Africans the status of slaves, a lifetime condition. Once a slave always a slave. The children of slaves were similarly enslaved for their lifetime. This legislation created a body of workers who labored year in year out without getting any reward for their work. Their work served to enrich the gentlemen in the Jamestown colony as well as the wealthy investors back in England who had financed the ships and equipment to found the colony in the expectation of rich rewards.

Barely hanging on for the first 10 or 15 years, the colony began to thrive when tobacco was first planted in Virginia. The soil and climate turned out to be favorable and the indentured servants, black and white, could be made to do the hard work in the tobacco fields.

The land needed to raise all this tobacco was taken – stolen – from the Native Americans who lived in the area. Many different tribes, organized into a powerful coalition, lived where the English colonists chose to settle. Initially welcomed by the native inhabitants, relations between the English and the local inhabitants soon soured and more than once erupted into bloody warfare. The colonists received instructions from England to convert the native peoples to Anglicanism and to civilize them in the ways of the English. The authors of these instructions did not see the irony of stealing people's land and then ordering the thieves to civilize the victims who had been robbed by teaching them the ways of the thieves.

This irony has been with us ever since. White Americans have ravaged the lives of the descendants of Black Africans and the descendants of the Native Americans and taken their own inhumanity as a sign of White superiority. Appropriating the land of the one and the ability to work of the other, White Americans have become very rich at the expense of people who are not White. They have shamelessly interpreted their success in exploiting other human beings as a sign of moral and even spiritual superiority.

The Jamestown assembly, the precursor of the US Congress and of the varied institutions of the United States government, in passing the first Black Codes defining slavery as a lifetime condition of utter deprivation set the precedent for later American legislatures that to this day, for instance by demanding picture IDs for voting, deny the humanity and the citizenship rights of Black and Native Americans. Successor legislatures to the Jamestown assembly have only managed to expand the range of peoples insulted and exploited and treated as less than human than White Americans.

That Donald Trump, arch racist, should celebrate that institution is not surprising. We, on the contrary should mourn it. In Jamestown, North America got off to a really bad start. We have never recovered from that. The efforts of many people to overcome this terrible heritage have only had very limited success so far.

Our moral bankruptcy

The news from home is not good.

Drug deaths, especially in older white men, have increased significantly in recent years. Drug overdoses are more frequent every year.

"Suicide in the United States has surged to the highest level in nearly 30 years." [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/health/us-suicide-rate-surges-to-a-30-year-high.html] The suicide rate is particularly high among veterans and not, as one would think, among combat veterans but among soldiers who spent their tour of duty on military reservations back home. [http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-veteran-suicide-20150115-story.html]

The number of women who give birth and then succumb to postpartum depression has increased in recent years. [https://www.sciencedaily.com/ releases/2013/10 /131002131400.htm]

And on a slightly different note, there is a steady increase of students who miss classes in middle and in high school for more than 10% of school days.

The news is better with respect to the divorce rate, the frequency of domestic violence, and the rate of physical and sexual abuse of children. The incidence of all three has gone down but all of them, of course, remain serious problems.

All of these statistics are controversial. There are always real and so-called experts who have different numbers. But these statistics are regarded as reliable by people who understand statistics and who know where these particular ones come from.

I came across these data at the same time that newspapers reported an apparently good piece of news, namely that household income has been rising. On closer consideration, however, this good news is very qualified. It turns out that individual income of people who work for wages has remained stagnant. Household income has risen because people work more, work longer hours, work full time where they worked part-time before.

Individual income of wage earners remains unchanged at a time when corporations report rising income. Corporations earn more money because they manage to keep costs down and one significant kind of cost are labor costs. Workers earning the same as what they took home a long time ago is one of the reasons for the rosy earnings reports of corporations. Workers are being exploited to benefit corporate bottom lines.

The failure of workers' wages to rise in a time when the well-to-do, the recipients of dividends, the CEOs of enterprises, lawyers and doctors, see their income go up and their standard of living improving steadily is often blamed for the the reports about depression and suicide and other negative statistics.

But that explanation leaves out an important component of the malaise that has our country in its grip. There are a large number of people who feel insulted, whose sense of their own worth is under attack.

The rise of neo-Nazis, of white supremacists is a clear symptom of this offended sense of self. Significant numbers of Americans rest what little self-esteem they have on their skin color – a characteristic for which they cannot take credit. We are born with different skin colors. They are not earned. They are not an accomplishment. If the best I can say about myself is that I'm white, I admit that I have not done anything that I can take pride in.

The white supremacist will reply: 'I am proud of being white because whites are superior to persons of color.' But consider this analogy. Jimmy is a member of an illustrious family: among his relatives are a US President, a Supreme Court Justice and several super-rich entrepreneurs. For himself, Jimmy has not done so well. Married several times but now divorced, Jimmy has had many jobs but is always living pay-check to pay-check. His life has been a series of failures. But he is proud of his distinguished family. This is pride by association, a poor source of self-esteem for those whose own life is beset with failures.

If your self-affirmation rests on sharing the skin color of persons who are famous for their accomplishments--ignoring for the moment whether those accomplishments are mythical or real--you are acknowledging that your own life is lacking in accomplishments and legitimate sources of pride.

Why are so many Americans unable to achieve a solid self-esteem? Why is the color of their skin the most remarkable about them?

Success, in America rests on being upwardly mobile. As the years pass, one needs to increase one's earnings and in order to accomplish that one needs, most of the time, to increase one's power to extract wealth from other people. The working people whose salaries remain the same year in, year out are the victims of this extraction of value. Because their income is flat, their employer's prosper. The employer has the power to keep them working for low wages. Their income does not substantially rise; their power remains minimal.

By prevailing standards of success in America these working people are not successful. They have not accomplished anything.

This version of success is reprehensible. This idea of what makes a life worth living is utterly immoral. The good life according to this American doctrine rests on the ability to harm others, to extract value from them and their work. The successful people are those who can injure others. Life is not worth living for those who are unable to harm others.

Perhaps this ethic is behind the American love affair with guns and the high murder rate in some of our cities. If you cannot enrich yourself at the expense of others, at least you can threaten them with your guns or shoot them.

The much discussed "opioid crisis," the rate of suicide and of depression and other negative statistics such as the rate of poverty in this, one of the richest countries in the world, is a symptom of our moral failure. The big people, the people in the news, are all rich and they have become rich at the expense of others. In the prevailing morality that is acceptable. Devastated lives, misery, is the result.

Only a moral reformation would make America great again.

                     Hunger Games

        A recent movie, Hunger Games, portrays an imaginary country in the future where one lives luxuriously in the country’s capital while the farmers and miners in the remote provinces are literally starving to support the high style of the central city.

        This unequal system is maintained by public spectacles, the so-called Hunger Games included. In these annual games young persons selected by lot from every part of the country are let loose in dark forests with plenty of weapons but little else. The victor is the person who emerges alive after killing all the competitors.

        A recent story about seating on airplanes echoes the future society of the Hunger Games. Many airplanes have seating in the cabin, in business class, and in first-class. First-class passengers are likely to pay 10 times the price of passengers in the cabin class. There the airlines keep shrinking the space allotted to each passenger. In first-class, on the contrary, seats will now convert to flat beds for a comfortable night's sleep. Passengers are fed by renowned chefs and tranquilized with expensive champagnes.

        I have no problem with people who pay 10 times what I paid for my flight being pampered in ways barely imaginable to me. But then I start thinking where the money comes from to pay for these luxurious seats. A large portion of these fancy Dan seats are paid for by businesses. It is not only the 1% that pays for such excessive luxury but the treasuries of large corporations who pamper their CEOs and other chief employees.

        How can the corporations afford this? Are they not supposed to be "lean and mean"? What happens in the airplane, happens at work. This CEO gets a seat that costs 10 times what the employee in cabin class pays. The CEO flies in luxury; the employee sits in a cramped seat. At work the employee gets paid as little as possible. Their benefits continue to be reduced. Their job security continues to be diminished. The CEOs paycheck gets fatter.

        As a consequence, the Corporation makes money hand over fist and can pay for luxury seating on the airplane for the CEO. It's Hunger Games all over. The luxury in the capital is made possible by starvation in the countryside. Here the luxury in first-class is made possible by the real discomfort in cabin class and the Corporation can pay for excessively expensive seats for the CEO by continuing to squeeze their workers. (Those squeezed the most travel by bus; they do not even get on the  airplane.)

        Hunger Games is not about the future. It is about our world today.
What keeps us going are not fights unto death on television but the increasingly bitter struggle for any work at all, let alone for decent work. A significant number of college graduates are doing minimum-wage work. The unemployment rate is going down because more and more people stopped looking for work. Business interests are putting up a major fight against raising the minimum wage to $10.50 an hour. A living wage is not even under consideration.
As in the world of the Hunger Games the majority in ours is made to lead starkly difficult lives for the sake of luxury for the few.