Pigs, Hogs, and Suicide Nets

Donald Trump visited the site of the new Foxconn factory on Thursday, outlandishly praising the Taiwan-based electronics giant as "the eighth wonder of the world" and mouthing vague threats against Harley-Davidson, which has announced it will outsource more jobs to Europe as a result of the president's chaotic trade war tariffs.

"Don't get cute with us," sneered Trump in his best Tony Soprano imitation. He was, after all, speaking in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. A Harley factory which manufactures the iconic Hog motorcycles is located right nearby, so perhaps he fancied that his electronically-enhanced (by an addicted cable TV news conglomerate) voice traveled there by magic. Or maybe it was just by the usual osmotic method with which Trump seems to infiltrate our brains whether we like it or not.

I suspect Trump might be dumping all over Harley-Davidson simply because he knows he wouldn't look good posing on one. The Hog would be in danger of collapsing under the weight of the pig. This guy looked like he could barely even hoist a shovel for his Foxconn publicity stunt.

But perhaps that's mean of me. He could be dumping all over Harley because he is still obsessing over Hillary Clinton and free-associates the Hog with all that money she made on hog and cattle futures when she was first lady.

I also suspect that Trump is gushing all over the new Foxconn plant because, just like himself, it is foreign-owned and will be rewarded handsomely via billions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives, a/k/a corporate welfare.

I even suspect that, given that Foxconn became infamous for its installation of suicide nets for its Chinese wage slaves,Trump and his cronies might actually be betting on American suicide futures instead of Hog and hog futures.

As reported by The Guardian on a visit to one of Foxconn's notorious Chinese factories:

“It’s not a good place for human beings,” says one of the young men, who goes by the name Xu. He’d worked in Longhua for about a year, until a couple of months ago, and he says the conditions inside are as bad as ever. “There is no improvement since the media coverage,” Xu says. The work is very high pressure and he and his colleagues regularly logged 12-hour shifts. Management is both aggressive and duplicitous, publicly scolding workers for being too slow and making them promises they don’t keep, he says. His friend, who worked at the factory for two years and chooses to stay anonymous, says he was promised double pay for overtime hours but got only regular pay. They paint a bleak picture of a high-pressure working environment where exploitation is routine and where depression and suicide have become normalised.
“It wouldn’t be Foxconn without people dying,” Xu says. “Every year people kill themselves. They take it as a normal thing.”

Consider the fact that Wisconsin taxpayers will not see a dime of their forced investment in this plant for at least 25 years. Consider the fact that Foxconn promises to create 13,000 new jobs with bait-and-switch salaries of $50.000  being bandied about in the press releases. Consider the fact that suicide-by-gun in Wisconsin is far more common than in most states.

 Consider the fact that the vast majority of these deaths are of white rural males in the prime of their lives - men who have seen their jobs disappear, their lives and livelihoods ruined. Deaths from despair among struggling working class people are increasing all over Exceptional America at a shocking rate.

In 2016, 142,000 Americans died from drug and alcohol-induced fatalities and suicide, an average of one person every four minutes. The Centers for Disease Control notes that this represents an 11 percent increase from the previous year.

Trump is so depraved I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he cited this increase as more proof that America is winning under his reign. He really is that much of a stupid and cruel man. 

There is so much more oligarchic profit to be made by investing in cheap, flimsy made-in-America suicide nets than in strong social safety nets like Medicaid and food stamps. There's so much more fun and profit in private prison futures and the construction of "tender age" facilities for migrant child prisoners than in public education futures and standard subsidized child care.

Trump is a cruel and stupid and vicious man. He is also the very model of a major neoliberal, entirely emblematic of the democracy-destroying and soul-destroying hypercapitalism which rules the world. 

America is turning into our very own Foxconn factory. Depression, suicide, drug overdoses and gun massacres are becoming normalized. It's just not a very good place for human beings.

***

Full disclosure: I hoisted a hunk of this post from my published New York Times comment on Paul Krugman's Harley-Davidson column. I am not one of those sticklers who avoids self-plagiarism like the plague. I am simply lazy sometimes, and as far as I know, there is no such thing as unremunerated theft of one's own profitless intellectual property, even though my comment apparently became the legal property of the Times Company the minute I submitted it. If the Times were Trump, they'd probably already be in court. But since they are certainly striving mightily to distance themselves from Trump even as they breathlessly gift him with every last pixel of the constant publicity he craves, I don't think I have much to worry about in the frivolous lawsuit department.  

I bring plagiarism up only because I noticed that one of the most highly recommended comments on the Krugman column got briefly called out as an unattributed copy/paste of a news article about Trump-supporting Harley employees. Both the "reader reply" politely calling the commenter out and the apologetic response from the original called-out commenter have since disappeared from the thread. The original plagiarized comment has, however, been allowed to stand by the moderators. Maybe the Times's avowed standards and practices as pertain to originality do not apply to the unpaid back-benchers. Or maybe the paper thinks that what it can hide from readers won't hurt them, and concurrently, that even plagiarized comments are fine as long as they are solidly both anti-Trump and anti-Trump supporter.

Maybe I'm making a mountain out of a mole-hill, or more accurately, out of the teeming ant-hill that is the typical major newspaper online comments section, but plagiarism has always been one of my biggest pet peeves. 

I'm not naming this commenter because I think he got the message, plus he did graciously own up to his faux pas. 

As far as the Times goes, meanwhile, do they ever own up to anything?

Neoliberalism Kills

In his weekend Vatican speech, Bernie Sanders called for a sweeping moral and anthropological study of the increasingly anti-social U.S. political system and record global wealth inequality. This can't come a moment too soon, because Americans have become so desperate that they are killing themselves in record numbers.

You might not know this unless tragedy has struck you personally. When you turn on the TV, all you hear about are the fortunes of a handful of very rich people vying for public office, or the latest terrorist attack. Suicide makes the headlines only when the guy is wearing a booby-trapped vest, or uses a personal armory to take a bunch of people with him in a blaze of glory. 

When President Obama and other politicians aren't sending their thoughts and prayers and vowing revenge for the latest "incident," they're boasting about how well "we" have weathered the financial crisis, thanks solely to our steely sacrifice and our supreme Grit and Determination. We're relentlessly informed that we're coming back stronger than ever before. The economy is booming! So get off the couch, and go find that ladder of opportunity.

But just in case you still have your doubts after more than seven years of the Obama administration, you should be grateful that at the very least, they're still concern-trolling gender pay inequities and decrying the misogyny of those nasty old Republicans. Even though the Democrats have done diddlysquat to actually force women's pay equality since first using Lilly Ledbetter as a human shield in 2009, they have orchestrated multiple photos of themselves signing proclamations to prove how much they care. I believe the weasel-word they use is "advancement." In other words, the ladies still earn only about 79 cents to every dollar a man makes, but at least the neoliberals are advancing the "conversation" forward. It's incrementalism you can believe in. It's progressively "getting things done" through the use of multiple pens and changes of clothes and slogans.

 

2009

Recent Proclamation to Mark the 2009 Proclamation

Next month, the White House, in conjunction with its corporate sponsors, will host yet another feminist photo-op, dubbed The United State of Women Summit. It will boastfully serve to showcase all that the Obama administration, with the help of too big to jail Goldman Sachs, has done to "empower" women -- just as Hillary Clinton seeks to become the first XX-chromosomed Commander in Chief. Obama even signed two additional proclamations deigning to recognize the equality of all women, along with a directive to the Labor Secretary politely asking that he politely request employers to divulge their pay scales.

 So what a shocker it is to find out that American citizens, particularly middle-aged women, are not united in passively absorbing this rosy liberal message!

Having suffered more than they can endure via lost jobs, lost homes, precarious and low-wage employment, single motherhood coupled with a lack of affordable child care, rising rents, cuts in food stamp and jobless benefits, substandard or no health care, self-medication and addiction stemming from lack of that health care, too many of them are deciding that the only escape from the unrelenting pain is suicide. They are making the ultimate revolutionary political statement, the only way they know how.

According to a study released today, the suicide rate for women aged 45-64 has jumped by 63 percent over the last 30 years. The starting date of the suicide spike more or less correlates with the advent of neoliberalism, or government of, by, and for the plutocrats. The neoliberal partnership of government and corporations started with the Reagan Revolution in 1984, and was continued by the Clintons, Bush, and now Obama. Hillary Clinton herself boasted in a memoir that she and Bill cut the welfare rolls (by a coincidental 60 percent) in order to "rehabilitate" single mothers, forcing them to work at low-paying jobs and condemning them to lives of hopeless poverty.

The suicide rate for middle-aged men increased by 43 percent. The overall rate has risen by 24 percent since the turn of the century.

And the most shocking - and telling - finding of all is the suicide rate for children, particularly girls between the ages of 10 and 14.  While still rare compared with the adult statistics, kids are now killing themselves at triple the rate within a 15 year time span. In 1999, 50 middle school-aged girls took their own lives. In 2014, that number rose to 150.

From the New York Times (the article was printed below the apparently more important news of the death of rock star Prince, and the breaking news about Donald Trump's friendliness toward gays, paired with propaganda about a new plan to improve the "tone" of his rhetoric):

The (overall) increases were so widespread that they lifted the nation’s suicide rate to 13 per 100,000 people, the highest since 1986. The rate rose by 2 percent a year starting in 2006, double the annual rise in the earlier period of the study. In all, 42,773 people died from suicide in 2014, compared with 29,199 in 1999.

“It’s really stunning to see such a large increase in suicide rates affecting virtually every age group,” said Katherine Hempstead, senior adviser for health care at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, who has identified a link between suicides in middle age and rising rates of distress about jobs and personal finances.

Earlier studies pointed to opiate addiction as the leading cause of premature death among less-educated white women. The newer study doesn't differentiate among educational levels in suicide statistics.

Meanwhile, the method of choice among people wanting to kill themselves is now death by suffocation, or hanging.

The newer suicide rates have not reached the intensity of those in the Great Depression, during which the self-killing rate increased by 70 percent. The fact that fewer older people are killing themselves in the 21st century than they were in the 1930s probably has much to do with the safety net of Medicare and Social Security. The Times quotes Dr. Alex Crosby of the Centers for Disease Control as saying that a definite correlation between economic depressions and suicide rates has been proven.

Can there be any clearer evidence that the economy is still in the pits, any clearer message to the Glass Half Full political crowd, than a 63 percent increase in the national suicide rate?

Meanwhile, the deficit hawks in both establishment political parties have been cutting mental health budgets across the board since the financial collapse began disrupting or destroying millions of lives and livelihoods. Even the prestigious National Institutes of Health had its budget for the study and treatment for depression only slightly increased over the past four years, despite mounting evidence of widespread despair in the population.  Depressed individuals are simply unable get the help and treatment they need, even if they want to.

And despite a publicized crackdown on them in Florida, there are still plenty of pill mills all over the country where you can score Oxycontin by the truckload and resell it at a profit to your friends and neighbors in order to make this month's rent. If that's not an option, the price of street heroin has become as affordable as a couple of gallons of gas or a pack of cigarettes.

We need a revolution, all right. Our very lives depend on it.

An exemplar for revolution comes from the vibrant mental health movement in Chicago, where medical professionals and patients have joined forces to protest the shuttering of clinics - conducted in the name of "fiscal responsibility" - by the despised neoliberal mayor, Rahm "One Percent" Emanuel. Mental health should be a basic human right, not a privilege reserved only for the wealthy few able to afford a private therapist.

This mental health movement of Chicago doesn't operate in a vacuum. To say that it works closely with the racial justice, housing justice, immigration justice and labor union initiatives is also an understatement. They all work together, holistically. Revolution comes with the realization that we are all in this together.

 Bernie Sanders might have no chance to win the presidency, but he still has the power of the bully pulpit. He can still be a great moral teacher by urging his followers to join protest movements that are far, far away from the cloying confines of the Democratic machine.

 

Some Victims Are More Equal Than Others

A Tale of Two Presidential Condolences.

In the coming days, we’ll learn about the victims -- young men and women who were studying and learning and working hard, their eyes set on the future, their dreams on what they could make of their lives.  And America will wrap everyone who’s grieving with our prayers and our love. But as I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and I said each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough.  It’s not enough.  It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel.  And it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America -- next week, or a couple of months from now.  -- Barack Obama, on the mass shooting that killed nine people in Oregon.

The Department of Defense has launched a full investigation, and we will await the results of that inquiry before making a definitive judgment as to the circumstances of this tragedy. ...Michelle and I offer our thoughts and prayers to all of the civilians affected by this incident, their families, and loved ones. We will continue to work closely with President Ghani, the Afghan government, and our international partners to support the Afghan National Defense and Security forces as they work to secure their country." -- Barack Obama, on the American bombing of a hospital that has killed at least 23 people in Afghanistan.

One condolence is eloquently maudlin and extended, the other is every bit as brief and clinical and detached as the series of "surgical strikes" that literally ripped apart an operating room, and incinerated critically ill people trapped in their beds.

If Obama is even dimly aware of his own cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy, he is doing his utmost to hide it. But as ever, when a mass shooting occurs on his turf, the sycophantic press makes him the center of the story. This time, as the New York Times mawkishly commiserated, he was "as visibly angry and frustrated as he has ever appeared in public during a brief televised statement from the White House."

And as George Orwell similarly commiserated in Animal Farm:

 “I trust that every animal here appreciates the sacrifice that Comrade Napoleon has made in taking this extra labour upon himself. Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure! On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

 I suppose that the people killed and injured in the Doctors Without Borders hospital made the wrong decision to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. As the deservedly despised Jeb Bush said about the Oregon shootings: "Stuff happens."

It must be hard out there for a Commander in Chief being expected to ask that Congress enact gun control laws, when he is simultaneously demanding that they allocate billions of dollars for guns, bombs and Predator Drones for his global adventures!  How hard it must be for him to castigate others for offering bland thoughts and prayers when he himself offers nothing but bland thoughts and prayers.

It seems that the only lives that count are American lives. Only American murder victims are looked upon as human beings who have been denied the chance to hope, dream, grow up, or grow old. When foreign people are killed, they are coldly downgraded to "the civilians affected by this incident." 

It could have been worse. Obama has at least bestowed upon them a bare minimum of humanity. His generals are still sticking to their own sanguine Collateral Damage depersonalization: Stuff happened.

Obama has long had a built-in auto-response to both types of murders. Domestic shooters are troubled young men who get hold of guns despite their mental health issues. Military shooters are patriots who often get accepted into the armed forces despite their mental health issues. And if they didn't have any mental health issues before they joined up, their chances of developing them skyrocket once the government issues them lethal weaponry and orders them to use it.

 A year before the Sandy Hook massacre that had Obama weeping on TV, an American soldier named Bobby Bales went on a shooting rampage in Afghanistan, young children among his 16 victims. Obama's response was boilerplate-similar to his reaction to the hospital bombing: “This incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan."

 Many of the young male perpetrators of mass mayhem, both military and domestic, can't even remember a day when this country has not been at war. Obama himself has grotesquely dubbed them the "9/11 Generation."

He said last year,

America endures in the courage of the men and women who serve under our flag. Over more than a decade of war, this 9/11 Generation has answered our country’s call, and three months from now, our combat mission in Afghanistan will come to an end. Today, we honor all who have made the ultimate sacrifice these 13 years, more than 6,800 American patriots.  And we give thanks to those who serve in harm’s way to keep our country safe and meet the threats of our time.

I guess an American bomber killing children in a hospital yesterday was not part of any combat mission, seeing as how Obama announced that the war would be over by the end of 2014.

Safely Enduring

 
When a mass shooting occurs in America, Obama calls it carnage. When a mass shooting or bombing at the hands of Americans occurs elsewhere in the world, Obama calls it "an incident." Or, if the circumstances are especially egregious, as the attack on Doctors Without Borders surely was, he magnanimously upgrades it to a Tragedy. 

If Barack Obama worked as strenuously to arm-twist and bribe and threaten members of Congress over gun control as he arm-twisted, bribed and threatened them into giving him fast-track authority to negotiate the corporate coups known as free trade deals, then the domestic weapons reform he purports to crave might have a smidgen of a chance.

The truth is that Obama didn't make a peep about gun control until after the Sandy Hook shootings. And even those noises were tepid and belated. Instead of immediately sending a bill to Congress, he named a blue ribbon panel to leisurely discuss and debate gun violence. By the time lawmakers got around to voting on an actual bill, the NRA had attacked with its own threats and bribes, and the national grief and shock and outrage had been safely diluted.

The time to act is in the immediate aftermath of an atrocity.

But on the December 2012 day of the Sandy Hook shootings that killed 27 people, mostly children,  Press Secretary Jay Carney stopped the impetus right in its tracks. "This is not the day," he sanctimoniously told the nation, "to discuss gun laws."

And it's never a good day for them to discuss stopping their wars. International carnage is the only thing still inflating their puffed-up economy. Domestic carnage by way of more than 200 mass shootings this year alone is only a symptom of the larger American disease.

The real epidemic is suicide. One hundred Americans kill themselves every single day. But universal mental health care is not in our future, because the wealthy don't want to pay the taxes necessary to fund such preventive programs.

Economist John Komlos writes:

 This must be the moment to come to our senses and set entirely new priorities for our society in vigorously confronting the mass murder epidemic head on. We will never be able to lead decent lives unless we are capable of reigning in the terror at home, because we will continue to live with constant anxiety.

Instead of vacuous slogans of growing the economy and ineffective lamentations about the vicious murders, which will do absolutely nothing to lower the murder rate, we should set ourselves the explicit goal of reducing mass murders in the same way President John F. Kennedy declared the goal of reaching the moon within a decade. Ask the parents of the Sandy Hook Elementary School disaster if they’d agree with such a national mobilization at any price. We cannot do that on borrowed money. The only way to accomplish such a goal is by paying for it through additional taxes and a reduction in the conspicuous consumption of the super-rich. There is no getting around that.

Wealth inequality and the replacement of democracy with an oligarchy is hazardous to our health. The super-rich are a clear and present danger to all of us. 

 The lives of American citizens, Afghan citizens, all citizens, depend upon stopping the pathological rich. Eighty multi-billionaires now own half the wealth of the entire planet.

We can't afford them. It's time for a global wealth tax. It's the only way to cure them and their political operatives of their violent addiction to money and power and death.