Guest Opinion | The road ahead is ours to chart

— from Joseph Murphy —

As the late senator from Illinois, Everett Dirksen once said, “A billion here and a billion there, pretty soon you’re talkin about real money.”

Those were simpler times, when government spoke in terms of billions rather than trillions of dollars. Last Friday, the current occupant of the Oval signed into law a multi-trillion-dollar relief package to offset in part the economic devastation being caused by the COVID-19 virus pandemic.

Following the 2008 market crash, this would be the second in a little over a decade of these hitherto unthinkable relief packages of Yankee dollars that will flood into the bottomless maw of our economy.

Didn’t that nineteenth century wise guy Karl Marx predict something about increasingly devastating crashes of the capitalist economy?

Of course, some will benefit more than others and just how much of the multi trillions that will find its way into our community is yet to be seen. As lobbyists leave their sinecures on K Street and make their ways on well- worn trails to lawmaker’s offices on Capitol hill the guess here is that half a trillion-slush fund for the corporatists will shrink how much you and I see from the bounty

As economist Dean Baker put it in his clear-eyed blog this morning,
“Boeing will receive a seventeen-billion-dollar loan at preferential interest rates that will save them eight hundred and fifty million in interest payments – at minimum.” I believe Senator Dirksen would consider this ‘real money.”

And while Boeing stands in line with its begging bowl out they were pretty well screwed prior to the bug, anyway.

How about the indigenous nations, or even the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or the struggling postal system? You ask. Surely, they too will benefit for such largesse. Hmm…not so much. Or at all.

In fact, recalcitrant solons in the other Washington held up the package over concern that these freeloaders as well as our friends and neighbors would be lacking in incentive to perform the slave labors so required of them.

And so, it may be time to look on the sunny side of Death, as Eric Idle sang in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian,” for this may be just the pandemic we need to read the flyspecks on the wall.

“Socialism or barbarism,” once declared the equally clear-eyed Rosa Luxembourg not long before she was assassinated by the Kaiser’s minions.

I think we have all seen and experienced the barbarism offered up by capital and some of us are desperate to stop just such barbarism.

When one loses control over the mechanisms of one’s life – clean air and water, medical care, food – it becomes difficult to allow the laissez faire mechanisms of the market to work their magic.

Some will object to this configuration. To paraphrase Garett Morris, these folks will claim, “Wait a minute, capitalism has been very very good to us.”

And it will be true. For some, our friends and neighbors of the privileged classes, markets have provided them an excess of goods and services.

Yet for those down below, on the front lines at the grocery store or staffing the medical clinics, the ones who should be rewarded economically for risking their lives, barbarism is a daily deal that cannot be denied.

The masked and gloved many are the revolutionaries of tomorrow.

As I raise my withered pink paw in affirmation of what Seattle
Councilwoman Kasama Sawant has termed, ‘socialist solutions,” I also breathe the clear air and recognize the slower pace of Island life as something other than a nostalgic memory. I think, “Why not?”

What stands in our way at this opportune moment in the history of the species from realigning our economics with the human, our aspirations with possibility?

In the last couple of years these pages have been filled with laments over deficits in accountability from the governmental institutions that assert control over our lives. Be it the Port of Orcas, the County Prosecutors office, the Economic Development Council, or the County Commissioners these institutions have been playing a double game of evasion while serving the interests of ‘development’ and fear.

Where to start when so many issues cloud the horizon?

I say we start with our immediate environment – claim the land back from development and encourage as much local food autonomy as possible, protect the air and water by vehemently opposing the Trans-Pacific Pipeline now snaking towards us, refuse the entreaties of a capitalist system that requires you to rent out your house to city folk, take up the true defense of the realm.

Can the bug be any worse than the slow attrition of a totalitarian system that leaves us literally breathless, more brutal than the helplessness felt in the face of relentless development? Stay tuned.

But like the man said, “Be the change you wish to see.” There is no going back to anything like ‘normal. It’s up to us and the time is now.

(I dedicate these words to the memories of Ellis Marsalis, Wallace Roney, Bucky Pizarelli, and Lee Konitz, all recent victims of the COVID-19 virus.)