Turning Chinese, Part Two

One of my favorite anecdotes concerning modern China dates back to 1972 when President Nixon visited China and met with Zhou Enlai, the Premier of the communist state.  Though the exact exchange between the two men is disputed, the story is too delicious not to tell.

While walking about the grounds of the Forbidden City, Nixon is said to have asked Zhou what impact he thought the French Revolution (1789) had had on Western Civilization.  Zhou replied, “It is too early to tell.”

Even if this exchange did not take place exactly as I have told it (some who were present argue that Zhou thought Nixon was referring to the student riots in France in 1968), its widespread repetition and acceptance indicate at least the prevailing belief in the West that the Chinese take a much longer-term view of things than do we Americans.  We seem not to think or strategize much beyond the end of the current fiscal year (for the government) or, worse, the fiscal quarter (for private enterprise).

A few days ago I heard a lecture broadcast on our local public radio station, KALW.  It was a program from Alternative Radio, one of the very few sources of truly independent thinking about politics and social issues available today.  Richard Wolf was giving a talk entitled “Naked Capitalism”.  In the course of his talk, Wolf explained the fallacy underlying the idea of efficiency.

Efficiency, he said, is the idea that in deciding a course of action, one should weigh the costs entailed against the benefits to be gained.  This method of making a choice sounds rational but it is, in reality, a chimera.  No one can ever know all of the consequences to come from any proposed action.  Unintended consequences will, in fact, always far outnumber the intended ones.  Like the French Revolution, every action continues to have consequences ad infinitum.   So a “cost/benefit analysis” (which is, I learned in training to be a stock broker, a standard sales tool) can never be complete and is not a formula for making choices.

Remember DDT?  Eradicating mosquitoes and bed bugs, which carry disease and are annoying pests, seemed like a great idea to those who thought they could actually calculate ahead of time the costs and benefits of killing the bugs with DDT.  Few imagined the environmental disaster that DDT would end up causing.  Most people did not even see that disaster unfolding all around them until Rachel Carson published “The Silent Spring” in 1962.

This afternoon I awoke to another voice of reason, conscience, and knowledge telling me things that I did not know.  I had barely opened my eyes when I turned on KALW and heard the last 15 minutes of another broadcast from Alternative Radio, “Community Rights”.  This program was a talk given by Paul Cienfuegos.  I caught only the end of the question and answer period but was stunned by hearing a number of things entirely new to me.  In particular I learned that many federal laws that provide for what we take to be “rights”, including civil rights and the new health care system, are grounded in a single clause in the constitution, the interstate commerce clause.  I also learned that the conservative members of the current Supreme Court are looking for ways to redefine that clause to limit its scope in such a way as to render health care and federally mandated civil rights unconstitutional.

Again I wanted not only to hear the rest of the talk but to tell you to listen to it too.  (I have found that the Alternative Radio website at http://www.alternativeradio.org/ offers transcripts of its programs for only $3.00, a price even I can afford.)

I had two other thoughts as well.  One thought concerned my speculation that the United States is quickly – at least in historical terms – going the way of the old Soviet Union.  That is, the central government having bankrupt itself, the constituent republics or states will start to go their own ways as each struggles to establish full and competent government of its territories and population.

I have seen what I consider to be the beginning of this transformation take place over the last ten years or so.  In 2006 Governor Schwarzenegger signed an environmental protocol with Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain, thereby arrogating to the State of California a power specifically reserved for the Federal government under the Constitution, namely the power to make foreign treaties and alliances.  Similarly the assertion by a number of states of the power to legalize marijuana despite the federal government’s classification of the plant as an illegal substance provides another example of the Federal government’s impotence and irrelevance.

Beginning with Barry Goldwater (nominated for President by a Republican convention here in San Francisco just fifty years ago today) and flourishing under the Reagan regime, the conservative movement has sought to render Washington powerless, most effectively by making it bankrupt.  It is time to recognize that they have succeeded.  The United Staes of America is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

And here on the radio I heard the sound of its successor – or more properly successors – being born.  The Community Rights movement is the ultimate grass-roots assertion of authority by the people themselves, rejecting the federal government established by the Constitution.  If the world born out of the collapse of the US is anything like the one envisioned by Cienfuegos, the Republicans may come to rue the unintended consequences of their actions over the past half century.

The other thought I had was about the medium through which I encountered these ideas.  I thought about how much more I get when I turn on the radio than when I launch my browser and go online.

Radio gives me the unexpected.  When I turn on the radio, I have no idea what I am going to hear.  Day after day I hear voices that I would never have sought out and learn things that I would never have known were there to learn about.  The internet is a reference:  when I want to know about a subject, a search engine will retrieve a huge number of sources from which I can learn about my subject.  Radio, on the other hand, is a teacher:  when I turn on the radio, I hear about subjects which I had not previously imagined discussed and explained by intelligent and informed people.

Even when I went to the Alternative Radio website, I would not have known to click on the program called “Community Rights”.  The speaker’s name meant nothing to me, and neither did the title.  But when I turned the radio on before getting out of bed, I heard ideas and information that were wholly new to me and which I immediately recognized as true and truthfully important.  Knowing that I wanted to learn about “Community Rights”, I could then use the internet to gather the information I sought.  But it was radio that taught me that the subject was there to learn about.

Thank you, Mr. Marconi.

Forty Thousand People

San Francisco has a preeminent place in the history of the labor movement.  Men and women who fought – literally – for the right to form unions and bargain with management collectively overcame the combined forces of capital and the state in this city.  Their story is long and rich and powerful.  And after posting my thoughts yesterday, I found my mind dwelling on them throughout my shift, through the afternoon and evening and on into the night.

I knew that I wanted to spend the few minutes I have her today to tell you about one moment in that history.  I knew that I wanted to tell you about Howard Sperry and Nick Bordoise.  When I took my dinner break, I looked up the events I am about to relate in order to get the details right.  I saw that what happened took place on the fifth day of July, which was also yesterday’s date.  Those men were on my mind constantly throughout what was the eightieth anniversary of their deaths.

Up until the development of containerized shipping, the cargo on board every ship that docked in every port had to be off-loaded by individual men picking up and carrying each item (crates, barrels, furniture, etc.) off the ship and onto the dock.  The sailors operated the ship itself, but all cargo was handled by men who worked along the shore.  These men came to be called ’long shore men.

I know that you have not had time to read the novels I mentioned in my last post, but I hope that by the time you read my next post you will have purchased at least one of them – or checked it out of the library.  You cannot understand life in the industrialized world without understanding the position of working people vis a vis their employers.  Steinbeck’s novels will teach you that truth – and they will enrich your heart and advance your understanding of the nobility of the human spirit.

In the early 1930s, unemployment in the United States reached 25%.  One out of every four people you passed on the street had no income, no way to pay rent, to buy food, or to pay for any of the other necessities of life.  As a result, employers could and did cut wages lower and lower and lower.  Many did not pay their workers enough to live on, and in addition drove them relentlessly to work harder. 

You and I cannot imagine what it was to live through those times.  We find the tensions between the haves and the have-nots today bad enough, but they pale in comparison to the hostility that grew steadily on both sides during the Great Depression.  By 1933 the coal miners, then the sailors, then the longshore men began spontaneously to organize themselves into unions to demand better wages and better working conditions from their employers.  As for the employers, they had the police and military force of the government, their own private armies of “security” companies such as Pinkertons, and squads of vigilantes on their side.  Tense stand-offs boiled over into violence on many occasions, one of which was “Bloody Thursday” on San Francisco’s Embarcadero.

Since early May, every port on the west coast of the United States had been shut down by strikers.  Not a single piece of fruit, not a vegetable, and no manufactured products of any kind was shipped out of Seattle, Portland, Everett, Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Pedro, Oakland, San Francisco or any other port.  The police attacked strikers with tear gas, special vomiting gas, and finally with guns.  On July 5, 1934, Howard Sperry was shot by a policeman at Steuart and Mission Streets.  He later died of his wounds.  About the same time and only a short distance away, in front of a kitchen the strikers had set up to feed their men, Nick Bordoise, an out of work cook who was helping out as a volunteer, was also shot and killed.

Two days later, on Saturday the 7^th, two plain wooden coffins containing the bodies of Howard and Nick were loaded on wagons and drawn by horses at a solemn pace from the Ferry Building up Market Street to Valencia.  Forty Thousand people – union men, the families of the dead, and many who joined spontaneously as the procession made its way up the great thoroughfare – marched in uniform rows, eight abreast, in silence.  The street was lined by as many as a hundred thousand more who took off their hats, bowed their heads, and mourned the fallen workers.

Not a single word was spoken.  Not one of those thousands and thousands of people broke the silence.  All one heard was the slow, steady clopping of the horses hooves and the sound of the wagon wheels on the pavement for the entire length of the procession, over two and a half miles.

Within a few more days, the entire city of San Francisco was closed down by a general strike.  Not only the workers trying to win recognition of their unions but even small business owners, Mom and Pop stores, put signs of support in their windows and remained closed.  Shortly thereafter, having closed the west coast for 83 days, the longshoremen won the right to manage the operations of the ports themselves.

Such is the power for people who are together.

Last Rat

I had the last two days off.  I worked on another of my long-winded essays, this one on language, the law, and some of my experiences with the latter.  It is not quite finished, and today I start back to work, which means that I do not know when I will have time to finish it.

Every day that goes by without a new post feels like yet another failure in a life-long string of failures.  So I have decided to sit down here for the roughly fifteen minutes I have before I must hit the shower and get ready for work, to say what is foremost in my mind.  You have probably heard the adage that defines news as “Man Bites Dog” – a dog biting a man is not news, but a man biting a dog is.  So my thought today takes the form of a headline:

LAST RAT BOARDS SINKING SHIP

The rat in question would be me, and the ship the taxi industry.  Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar seem to have killed the traditional cab business.  Of course, the rudeness, ignorance, and bad driving of many cabbies in years past played a role, too.  And the industry’s resistance to increasing the number of cabs in this city meant that most people have had the bad experience I often had of calling for a cab and waiting, calling again and waiting, and often being left without a cab ever showing up at all.  Nor could you ever just step to the curb and hail one, as you can in New York, because there were so few that an empty one would never come your way.

I have much more to say on this subject – complaints about the ability of companies tied to the internet to operate illegal businesses without any legal ramifications at all and observations about the ways in which the structure of the business has over time stripped drivers, who were once unionized workers paid an hourly wage, of any benefits or protections and left them supporting the owners of the companies for whom they drive first and themselves only second.

Here is how it is.  I have to pay to go to work.  The amount varies, but tonight, Saturday, the most expensive time of the week to work, costs me $135 up front.  I pay that amount to rent the cab for twelve hours.  I also have to return it full of gas, which costs about $15 to $20 a night.  Thus I begin my work week in a couple of hours already $150 down.  There are nights that I do not take in $150 in the whole twelve hours.  Last Saturday I did well because a million people were in town for Gay Pride weekend, but the Saturday before I made $9.00 in the whole night.  The week before that, I made $1.00.

I hate Saturdays.  My stomach is already churning.  I am angry at people who use their smart phones to call the cab companies that claim they are not cab companies and operate illegally (Uber, Lyft, Sidecar), angry at the drivers for those companies, and angry at the absence of any recourse.  I had breakfast a couple of weeks ago with a wonderful friend who said that she did not really understand the importance of unions.  This is the importance of unions: right now, given the complete laissez-faire, unregulated competition within the taxi business, we the working drivers are driven to take any work we can get for any amount of money, no matter how little.  And our employers, both the companies and our passengers, can offer us next to nothing – or less than nothing, actually, since my employer offers me a loss of $150 to go to work.

Without organization as a single unit, labor is divided into individuals who will be driven to work for lower and lower wages because even those wages are better than nothing at all.

Read The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle, both by John Steinbeck.  I have to go to work.