Month: August 2009

As the economic powers that be persuade themselves that the deepest economic recession since the Great Depression is coming to an end, I’m hearing more and more fuss about the budget deficit. This is old news, but it bears repeating: According to figures in the U.S. State Department’s World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers report, in 2005, the U.S. spent more on its military than the next 19 countries combined:

Country	Military Expenditures Million dollars
United States	503,000
China, Mainland	85,300
United Kingdom	55,900
France	52,900
Japan	43,800
Germany	38,100
Italy	33,500
Russia	31,100
Saudi Arabia	25,400
India	18,800
Korea, South	18,500
Brazil	13,300
Canada	13,200
Spain	13,100
Australia	13,000
Israel	10,800
Turkey	10,300
Netherlands	9,570
China Taiwan	7,830
Iran	7,210

President Barack Obama has said he wants to improve the image of the United States around the world. The war in Iraq failed to find weapons of mass destruction and failed to halt ethnic cleansing there. The war in Afghanistan long ago lost sight of a purpose to apprehend Osama bin Laden. And everyone wants to spend their money wisely. Look again at that table. Do any ideas come to mind?

It is big news in California today that a federal district court has ordered California to reduce its prison population “by nearly 43,000 inmates over the next two years.” So I’ve spent the day looking at prison statistics.

To begin with, California’s problem is a national problem. While according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics numbers, California ranks only 18th of all the states in the union (Louisiana is first) in the proportion of its population it locks away, according to the King’s College of London International Centre for Prison Statistics, the U.S. as a country, both in terms of the total number of inmates and as a proportion of population, locks up more than any other country. The U.S. incarcerates more people than countries vastly larger in population. Ranked by proportion of population, the U.S. locks up more than such bastions of freedom as Russia, ranked 3rd with 628 prisoners per 100,000 population; Cuba, ranked 5th, with an estimated 531 per 100,000; Iran, ranked 58th with 222; Libya, ranked 59th with 209; Saudi Arabia, ranked 69th with 178; Zimbabwe, ranked 100th with 136; China, ranked 115th with 119; Vietnam, 125th with 107; Egypt, 147th with 85; and Syria, 183rd with 58. You might think the U.S. government and its subsidiaries might be the greatest threat to your freedom.

Of course, that depends on who you are. If you’re reading my blog, you’ve probably heard that Black men make up a disproportionately large share of U.S. prison populations. For every 100,000 black males in the U.S. population, 4,777 of them are in prison. They are over six times as likely as their white brothers to be in prison, nearly three times as likely as their Hispanic brothers, and four times as likely as their “other” brothers. The Bureau of Justice Statistics recognizes only three races: white, Black, and Hispanics. Individuals are either Hispanic or they are not. To combine with Census Bureau statistics, I added numbers for non-Hispanic “American Indians and Alaska Natives,” Asians, “Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders,” and “Two or more races.” In truth, there are probably no purebred humans anywhere on the planet. But Sergeant James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department, who arrested Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for “disorderly conduct,” should take note: This is a system of criminal injustice.

Black men are over six times more likely to be in prison than their white brothers, nearly three times as likely as their Hispanic brothers, four times as likely as their “other” brothers, 51 times as likely as their white sisters, nearly 14 times as likely as their Black sisters, over 32 times as likely as their Hispanic sisters, and–get this–936 times as likely as their “other” sisters. The numbers for Hispanic men and “other” men aren’t quite so outrageous, but even an “other” man is over 231 times more likely to be behind bars as is “other” sister. “Other” women are, by far, the least likely to be found in prison. Given that white males make up a majority of judges, prosecutors, and police, I can’t help but think of common white male fantasies involving “exotic,” “mysterious” Asian women.

Men in general are over ten times more likely to be in prison than their sisters. White men are nearly eight times as likely to be in prison as their white sisters, twice as likely as their black sisters, five times as likely as their Hispanic sisters, and over 142 times as likely as their “other” sisters. I’m supposed to believe these are cultural differences but, believe it or not, some of these people have lived in this country for a long time. By the time you get to the third generation, people generally do not speak the language of their ancestors; they are “Americanized.”

According to the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, Black men make up 29 percent of the state’s prison population but on six percent of the state’s adult population. It’s better in California if you are white or “other.” Whites make up only 27 percent of the prison population even though they make up 48 percent of the adult population and “others” make up only six percent of the prison population even though they make up 15 percent of the adult population.

If we believe that all these people have been righteously convicted, then we accept a racist proposition that Black men are inherently more criminal than anyone else. And by the same logic, we accept that U.S. residents are more criminal than those of any other country. If we do not accept this line of reasoning, then California’s criminal injustice system needs only to do some introspection to see a solution to its prison overpopulation problem. But I’m guessing that won’t happen.

“Trina Thompson, 27, of the Bronx, [who] graduated from New York’s Monroe College in April with a bachelor of business administration degree in information technology” is suing the school because she has no job, claiming, “‘The office of career advancement information technology counselor did not make sure their Monroe e-recruiting clients call their graduates that recently finished college for an interview to get a job placement. They have not tried hard enough to help me.’ She suggested that Monroe’s Office of Career Advancement shows preferential treatment to students with excellent grades. ‘They favor more toward students that got a 4.0. They help them more out with the job placement.'”

We snicker too easily. Reporter Jason Kessler, who I’m guessing did a little better when he went to school, writes, “As Thompson sees it, any reasonable employer would pounce on an applicant with her academic credentials, which include a 2.7 grade-point average and a solid attendance record.”

Thompson clearly sees employment as the purpose of a university degree. Speaking of the many graduates facing unemployment this year, she says, “It doesn’t make any sense: They went to school for four years, and then they come out working at McDonald’s and PayLess. That’s not what they planned.” Of course it’s not what they planned.

And indeed, according to the U.S. Census bureau, people with a Bachelor’s degree or higher earned an average $59,097 in 2003. But also according to Census bureau figures (in 2004, the most recent available), more people (22.93%) in Thompson’s age group (25-29 years) have Bachelor’s degrees than ever before, presumably chasing that income.

Do jobs actually exist for all these people? Anecdotal evidence for a while has suggested the answer is no. And in the current economic climate, it’s not hard to see how a C/C+ average might be a handicap. The advice I’ve been hearing is both that you don’t a GPA below 3.0 on a resume and that employers know you don’t put a GPA below 3.0 on a resume.

So it’s Thompson’s fault, right? She should, we could argue, have worked harder. Setting aside that some people may not have the capacity to do better, and setting aside the severe disparities in primary and secondary education in the U.S. (see Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools), the Anglo-American world has a poor attitude towards intelligence. Edward W. Said writes in Representations of the Intellectual,

Commenting on the announced themes of my Reigh Lectures–Representations of the Intellectual–a sympathetic journalist states that it was a most “un-English” thing to talk about. Associated with the word “intellectual” was “ivory tower” and “a sneer.” This depressing train of thought is underlined by the late Raymond Williams in Keywords. “Until the middle twentieth century unfavorable uses of intellectuals, intellectualism and intelligensia were dominant in English,” he says, “and it is clear that such uses persist.”

Consider recent U.S. presidents: The Bush administration successfully advanced the most anti-intellectual policies ever, denying greenhouse warming, promoting abstinence-only sexuality education, and twisting intelligence estimates to support claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Bill Clinton loved MacDonald’s Big Mac hamburgers and actually tried to tell the U.S. public that fellatio with Monica Lewinsky is not sexual intercourse. Barack Obama seems to think he can get re-elected by favoring the rich, which, if you believe he was elected rather than selected, is certainly what George W. Bush did.

Indeed, working class whites are notorious for voting against their own interest, apparently because they blame competition from people of color for their declining prospects rather than the wealthy who have exported their jobs. A “Gallup Poll shows that only 39% of Americans say they ‘believe in the theory of evolution,’ while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36% don’t have an opinion either way.” And “most Americans – 63 percent – believe the Bible is literally true and the Word of God.”

In such a climate, a 2.7 GPA doesn’t seem so bad.

UPDATE: The experiment failed. The Benfell Blog has returned to livejournal.com.

It says something that speech communication theorists don’t notice what for me is the central theme of James Carey’s Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, that each improvement in communication technology leads not to a promised improved communication among people and thus, hopefully, world peace, but rather larger audiences for ever smaller groups of people. And it says something that mass communication scholars seem not to care.

Carey wrote of the printing press, newspapers, the telegraph, radio, and television. I extend his argument to the Internet, where still, a few voices dominate. Yes, I have a larger audience, via Twitter and Facebook than I ever would have before: a few hundred people, on Facebook, mostly vegan animal rights activists who spend their online lives signing petitions, sharing shock videos, and expressing outrage at human treatment of animals; and on Twitter, mostly vegans who have the prosperity to travel around eating at vegan restaurants. I am reading them, I think, much more than they are reading me, certainly on the Benfell Blog.

I’ve had The Benfell Blog up for several years, now, much longer than I’ve been vegan, on LiveJournal.com, and more recently on OpenSalon.com. And it seems that whether I’m writing well on a particular day or poorly, my audience is the same. I might as well be back in the days before the Internet, writing my letter of outrage to the editor.

But the Internet does make it possible for me to gather news from a wider variety of sources than ever before, and so I have more to be outraged about. On Wall Street, boosted by a bailout that has cost taxpayers billions, they’re convinced we’re in an economic recovery. That Gross Domestic Product continues to decline is not nearly so important as that it is declining at a slower rate. The bottom is near, they sigh with relief, as they push stock market prices ever higher. They even take heart from another bubble, produced by the Obama administration’s “Cash for Clunkers” program: buyers have flooded automobile dealerships, quickly wiping out the initial $1 billion allocated to remove less fuel-efficient vehicles from the road. But there is only a little hand-wringing, and none of it from people in power, over the ever wider discrepancy between rich and poor that makes the consumer spending this economy has relied upon for so long unsustainable.

And the Iranians, bless their hearts, who for all their outrage, have more of a democracy than we do here in the United States: because you see what happens in the U.S. when someone steals an election. I guess that’s okay as long as the one blessed by evangelical Protestants is doing the stealing. Never mind that Obama won by a large margin both in popular and electoral votes; for conservatives it only matters that they can focus media attention on a perfectly good birth certificate. In Iran, it seems at the moment as if the regime is untenable; it must fall and we are now just waiting for the divisions among the clerics who rule to tear the government to pieces. But in the U.S., the Obama administration is trying “trickle down” economics again: bail out the banks, bail out the automobile manufacturers, but not the homeowners facing foreclosure, the workers losing jobs, or ever, under any circumstances, the poor. Obama has been backtracking on every campaign promise he ever made, but “the system works.”

The system indeed works, as we squabble over “cap and trade.” (Conservatives see it as high treason.) This allows us to keep on emitting greenhouse gases, as long as other countries do not. (Can you say “gap between rich and poor?”) And so the polar ice keeps melting, poor people in Bangladesh are forced from their homes, we’re going through a massive species extinction event, and we can’t raise taxes on oil companies, and we sure as hell can’t stop subsidizing ethanol production from what would otherwise be food for the hungry. “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” says the Obama administration.

Yes, I have a few things to say, even if no one ever reads them. And now I’m hosting my blog on my own server (actually a virtual machine sharing a real machine on a very fat Internet connection) with software that offers more options than LiveJournal ever thought of. Among other things, it should do a better job of publicizing my rants.