Let's Talk about FEMA

Mitt Romney doesn't want to talk about FEMA anymore. Of course, he doesn't. What he wants to do is very unpopular, especially at times like this, because it would benefit only a very, very few. He wants to downsize FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) and outsource it, make those ever-more-frequent weather disasters into another profit-making opportunity for the 1 percent, which of course means that it wouldn't work very well, if at all, especially not for the 47 percent that it's not his job to think about.

Romney, Ryan, and the rest of the Drown-Government-in-a-Bathtub folks don't believe in FEMA. To them, natural disasters like the one we experienced this week are just a way to reduce the surplus population. They don't have a stake in what happens to anyone else. Their only stake is what happens to themselves and maybe a few of their cronies.

What they don't understand—refuse to understand—is that living in a civilized society has to mean that we have have a vested interest in what happens to each other. It means acknowledging that your well-being, or lack of it, affects me, and that I'm willing to invest in our collective well-being. Because we all do better when we all do better. Our communal well-being compounds our individual well-being, and our individual well-being depends on our communal well-being.

The plundering plutocrats and corporate kleptocrats among us believe that their well-being is separate from and paramount to ours. They believe that having so much means that they deserve more. They think somehow they can horde it, like a mound of jewels in a dragon's den, and that somehow continually adding to their collection will enhance their well-being. But just like the junkies that they are, they can never get enough, and the more they get, the more they want. They will never be satisfied.

In his excellent book Billionaires and Ballot Bandits Greg Palast recounts this story of Charles Koch stealing oil from the Osage Indians in Oklahoma:

 I'd been a racketeering and fraud investigator for twenty years already when I jumped into the investigation of the Kochs. Koch's motive for the skim was obvious: he wanted the money. But, for me, this was a new level of weird. Why in the world would Charles Koch, then worth about $2 billion, want to take three dollars from some poor Indian lady?
It even puzzled his own henchmen. Roger Williams asked Koch, who was literally giggling over the amount of "overage" he'd pocketed, why the billionaire bothered to filch pocket change from Osage families.
Williams was wired, and what he related on the tape has stuck with me a long time. According to Williams's recording, Koch answered:
"I want my fair share—and that's all of it.

This plundering pirate actually believes he is entitled to all of it. That his fair share is all of it. Just cuz. Talk about "entitlements"!

Imagine for a moment, if you will, that you live in a smallish village of humans, and it's the only such village anywhere. And surrounding your village are wild animals that occasionally attack your cattle and the cattle that belong to some of your neighbors. And occasionally a storm will blow through and damage some but not all of the crops.

Now imagine a village meeting in which you all discuss what's to be done about these threats to the well-being of some of the villagers. Will it be only the ones whose crops and cattle have been harmed that advocate for a collective response to help prevent and mitigate future damage? Will there be a wealthy villager who, having built high walls around her crops and cattle, refuses to invest in the protection of the crops and cattle of others? Will that wealthy one refuse to see that her well-being depends on the well-being of the village? That if the rest of the village does not thrive, there will be fewer able to purchase the wealthy one's produce? If so, how will the rest of the village respond to the wealthy one's recalcitrance? Maybe pass a law that requires that all contribute, whether they want to or not?

Of course, reality is seldom quite so simple, but nonetheless we are the global village. And some think that their well-being is independent of and superior to that of the rest of us. But they could not be more wrong. When it comes to our precious and fragile planet, when it comes to the dangers we all face—to our health, to our environment, to our civil liberties—we really are all in this together. That's what FEMA means, ultimately.

When a ginormous hurricane pummels the East Coast, those of us in Wisconsin know that we are not unaffected, even though all we get here of the storm itself are a few gusty winds. We know that our well-being depends on the speedy recovery of those whose lives and livelihoods have been damaged by the storm. We are in this together. That's why we have a federal government and why we have FEMA.

And that's why Romney doesn't want to talk about it. Because he's that one person who believes that his well-being is more important than that of others, and he knows that's not going to play very well with the rest of the village.

Reclaiming the Commons

Advertisements insidiously worm their way into our hearts and minds despite our best efforts to tune them out (which is why Tom and I don't watch TV anymore). They must be accomplishing something, or advertisers wouldn't shell out the big bucks for them, would they?

But isn't there some kind of saturation point? Aren't we getting to a place where people are just sick to death of always having stuff hawked and pushed at them? Does anyone else ever feel like you spend your whole goddamn life in a marketplace, with sellers screeching at you nonstop?

This must be why younger people are known to be a more susceptible "market." (They're human beings—not a market!) They haven't yet reached their saturation point.


I just have to say shout this: I am not a consumer! I am a human being! I am not a market! I'm a person!

Capitalism is all well and good to a point, but could we put some boundaries around it so that not every goddamn thing in life is first and foremost a money-making opportunity? There are many arenas in life that are not appropriate for capitalist meddling. Prisons. Health care. Education. Military. This shouldn't be so very hard to grasp, but the folks currently holding the reins—that would be the corporate 1%—don't have the first clue.

How can we have a prison system that makes more money when there are more prisoners? The system has a vested interest in putting more people in jail. How can that possibly work in the cause of justice?

How can we have a health care system that makes more money when people are sick? Or that turns away those who are sick because they are unprofitable? The system has a vested interest in people being ill and needing more "care," provided they have the means to pay for it. How can that possibly work in the cause of health?

How can we have an education system that makes money off of our children's future? The system has a vested interest in enrolling as many children as possible and churning out cookie-cutter automatons ready to be fed into the corporate profit machine. How can that possibly work in the cause of education?

How can we have a military system that makes more money when we are at war? The system has a vested interest in devastating parts of the planet where other profit makers plan to establish more "profit centers." How can that possibly work in the cause of peace?

The same can be said of journalism. How can we have "news" sources whose sole purpose is to make money? The system has a vested interest in not offending its corporate sponsors. How can that possibly work in the cause of truth?

And public transportation. Our poor beleaguered planet is begging us to figure out how to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels. Is this really so beyond us? Yes, doing so will cause some disruption for those whose livelihoods come from fossil fuels. But won't the solutions also provide livelihoods? And can we not assist those working in a harmful industry to transition to a less harmful one?

The fact is that we have allowed capitalism to run amok, to the point that it has metastasized. It has invaded area after area where it doesn't belong. It needs to be excised before it completely cuts off our vital organs and reduces us to a neofeudal machine in which the only acknowledged "good" is profit, that is, profit for the very few. Walmart wages and Walmart living for the rest of us. That would be hell on earth, and that is precisely where we're heading.

Is there anything wrong with ordering our common life for the common good, rather than for the profit of the very, very few? Could we not declare some areas of life off-limits to the profit makers? This is not a new or radical or alien idea. The ordering of the lives of all for the profit of a very few isn't a new idea either. It's been called many things: feudalism, plutocracy, fascism, to name a few. And we've seen how those have worked out—not well at all.

It's time to choose, time to get busy and root out the sanctified greed that is causing the rapid deterioration of our common life. Time for all of us to pitch in and push, not for what will benefit only you and yours (or more accurately, them and theirs, as in the 1%). Rather it's time we all worked for what will benefit the human family. It's time to roll up our collective sleeves, work together tirelessly and joyously to restore the common good. It's time to reclaim the commons.

# # #Many thanks to Ricardo Levins Morales for the Reclaim the Commons poster.