Getting a Grip |
Reboot America!by Michael I. Niman |
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A lesson from post-consumerist Cuba
So here’s my question: Are we really an aberration? Are we freaks for riding our bikes to work and keeping our house comfortably cool in the winter? What’s normal, really? Should we bring our 3,000-pound machines to work and struggle for a place to park them when we’d just as soon spend the same time riding our bikes? Should we heat our house to feel like we live in Miami, just so we can wear summer clothing in the winter? Are we freaks for not buying in to this weirdness? Are we really an aberration? I don’t think so. Not anymore, at least.
The new economy is ushering in a new reality. Factory output is down. Consumption is down. This means resource depletion and waste production are consequently down as well. Big boxes are closing their doors and, get this, the national savings rate has moved from the negative numbers (meaning the average American was falling deeper into debt spending more than she or he was earning) to a more sane five percent of household income. It turns out we really didn’t need all that shit after all.
Deep ecologists and credit counselors have been trying for quite some time to get us to stop buying our way into ecocide and bankruptcy. It seems that both the planet and our wallets couldn’t take it. It sucks that it took a depression to get us here, but historians might just look back on this depression as the event that saved the ecosystem just when we were on the brink of flopping over a climatic tipping point. Maybe there’s a silver lining to a plummeting Dow. Maybe it’s not just our environment that may have gotten a reprieve. Perhaps our collective soul as a culture may have gotten a breather as well. Enough was enough. We clearly weren’t shopping our way into happiness.
I’ve seen the aftermath of a consumerist apocalypse. That was Havana. By the time I showed up on the scene, first as a grad student in the late 1980s and later in 1999 and 2000 after the collapse of Cuba’s Soviet benefactor, the skeletons of the hedonistic 1950s were lying as well preserved but lifeless ruins.
Havana’s downtown shopping district was eerie on one level, yet bizarrely normal and even healthy on another. The department stores were still there, with their stainless steel and marble facades, but the goods were gone and the stores mostly boarded up and abandoned to the elements, with an old Rex store appearing to bleed some sort of fluid from its long sealed entranceway. The old Woolworth was still open last I was there, but it’s shelves were all but bare, with an odd array of automotive gaskets and hairclips filling an old glass display case. People still came, as if exercising ancestral muscle memory. But there really wasn’t anything to buy. Clearly they miss all the bling and, almost to a person, want to tell you about how difficult life is and how they long for stuff to buy. Middle-class Cubans even reduce themselves to pining for the half-empty bottles of shampoo their gringo friends leave behind. But oddly, they seem for the most part to be happy.
Last week, with reports of collapsing consumer confidence and freefalling housing and stock markets here in the US, I dove into the task of scanning my old Cuba negatives into digital files. As I manipulated the newborn digits on these photos, I looked once again at the faces of the Cubans navigating through post-consumerist ruins. Their world appears crazy, but there’s laughter, smiles, and healthy human interaction. They’re sitting on benches talking, playing chess and dominos, and watching their kids run about. Their conversation isn’t dominated by “things.”
I recall how goods would occasionally trickle into the stores, and folks would line up for a chance to spend worthless pesos on the item du jour. When I was there, it was colorful striped spandex stretch pants—worthless to us, but cherished by Cuban consumers with little else to buy. This is old-time consumerism: You don’t have much, but you value the little that you do have. And you enjoy and appreciate having it. Think of a poor kid whose family saves for a year to buy him or her that special Christmas present. And think about the months spent anticipating its arrival. And how it was cherished once it came. Then think about the spoiled rich kid with his or her little warehouse of unused and unappreciated toys. Life is not about the quantity of what you own, but about the quality of your experiences, both with things and without.
Two generations of life without consumerism has given Cuba one of the smallest per capita ecological footprints in the world. The US embargo and Cuba’s dearth of hard currency meant that they couldn’t afford pesticides and patented genetically modified organisms. The result is that Cuba moved ahead in research on pesticide- and Frankenfood-free agriculture. Today, they are a global leader in sustainable organic farming. On the road, Cubans are still driving around in 60- and 70-year-old cars. The inability to afford new ones forced them to figure out how to keep the old ones on the road forever. It turns out that junkyards, which, like massive garbage dumps, are among the topographic blisters of consumerism, are actually just culture-bound syndromes. We don’t need to replace everything all the time. Things can be fixed. People can be employed fixing things.
This is not to say that poverty is fun. And as a well-off American I don’t want to romanticize a poverty I’m not forced to experience. And as someone with the freedom to criticize my own government and culture, I certainly don’t want to romanticize life in a one-party state without a free press. But we can learn from the Cuban experience in that life is indeed possible after consumerism. And it appears to be much more sustainable on both an ecological and a social level.
Depressions, including those that can last for generations, aren’t fun. But they are survivable. They can be learning moments—chances to reboot society and get our priorities and values back in order. Perhaps we can once again value quality time with our friends, lovers, and families. Maybe we can appreciate leaving a healthy planet to our kids more than racing to the mall in a new Lexus. Maybe.
The challenge to maintaining social cohesion in a depression is the equitable distribution of pain. The Cubans can weather living with almost nothing, on a material level, because what they do have, are the essentials. Everyone has some sort of housing, food, access to education, and a baseline of medical care. What a deepening depression will look like here, however, threatens to be much worse, with some folks not being able to afford their chemotherapy, while others continue to day trade. We can have social cohesion, but not with Maseratis speeding past homeless encampments.
Our growing poverty is also quite different from Cuba’s. Ours began as conceptual poverty. The rich material wealth and infrastructural assets of our society are still here. Our buildings, roads, and machines haven’t disappeared. Our depression, like my scanned photos, is digital: Digital concepts of wealth, such as stock indexes and home equity, have evaporated. Conceptual wealth flipped to conceptual poverty. High stock and housing market indexes are like fiat currencies—worth only what people are willing to pay for them, which ain’t much right now. Digital wealth has been looted by hedge funds and driven into chaos by derivative markets. This caused a real poverty, with unemployment soaring and the very people whose real-life work buoyed the economy for so long, feeling most of the pain. With digital poverty now causing real life poverty, it’s time to reboot the system.
First we need to get real and understand how we got here. When the Berlin Wall fell, and the Reagan crowd cheered the “death of communism,” I feared that something entirely different was happening. There was just too much hubris and greed in the air. Back then, I argued that it wasn’t communism that was in peril—it was capitalism that now would be left to its own self-destructive hand. And sure enough, we took the deregulation and upward wealth redistribution balls put into play by the Reagan administration, snorted some coke, and throughout the next two decades let the roulette wheel spin, finally removing the last safeguards on the banking system during the George W. Bush presidency.
Ultimately it was the short-sighted, greed-based policies of the Republican party that put us into two depressions. Now, once again, the nasty task of pulling us out of a depression falls on the shoulders of Democrats who inherited another soiled economy. The only way to get us out of this mess is to reverse the upward redistribution of wealth that got us into this quagmire. The fix is going to take much more than a stimulus package. It will require a total reboot of our national priorities and personal values. Economic recovery and sustainability will require fixing things like our health care system, where private monopolistic control of life-saving technologies enabled a debilitating inflationary cycle that put health care out of the reach of the working poor. It also fueled the bankruptcy crisis, and ultimately, with the cost of providing healthcare to workers falling on manufacturers, made our industrial products uncompetitive in the global marketplace. Fixing the economy starts with fixing healthcare—not because it’s the right thing to do but because we have to do it. The same goes for building a 21st-century, sustainable power grid, transportation infrastructure, and public education system.
And yes, the only way to pay for this is to tax those who can pay, who happen to be the same people who benefitted from the generation-long looting that brought our economy down. The simple sociology here is that the rich can only be rich because governments exist to protect their privilege to be rich—to maintain their islands of luxury in the middle of a sea of comparative poverty.
The Obama administration seems to understand much of this, but they’re pissing on a forest fire. Their actions thus far have been dwarfed by the problems they’re combating. Letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire, for example, adds up to less than a four percent increase on their tax rate. To put this into perspective, if we doubled their taxes, people in the top brackets would still be paying 20 percent less than they did during the Republican Eisenhower administration. Likewise, by simply saving failed banks and insurance companies, we’re bailing out failed polices and reinforcing an out of control digital economy. Our problems are big. Our solutions have to be equally big and brilliantly creative. We’re America. We can do this.
Dr. Michael I. Niman is a professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Buffalo State College. His previous columns are at www.artvoice.com, archived at www.mediastudy.com and available globally through syndication. For more information on historic tax rates, see Getting a Grip 11/20/08 online at the Artvoice archives (v7n47).
Reader Comments
John Q Blogger 11 Mar 2009, 20:14
Do more than save money for yourself and save the planet by using Turbo
Tax. The Federal and State tax refund is in fact higher when consumers use
Turbo Tax.
Christopher Bieda 15 Mar 2009, 22:21
"Everyone has some sort of housing, food, access to education, and a
baseline of medical care." Education and equal access to medical care (the exception being the super-elites, of course), check. Housing? I haven't a clue. But food? Not so fast, professor. I suppose, gramatically, it's true: Everyone in Cuba probably eats every day, but do they eat enough? Not according to the U.N. World Food Programme, which is "in country" with an effort in the east of the island where childhood nutrition is seriously compromised, a tremendous ding in the egalitarianism of the regime. WFP reports that Cuba must import 80% of its food, so its sustainable organic agriculture is wholly unimpressive. I'm actually skeptical that anyone has persuasively argued that sustainable organic agriculture can feed the world's (now) 7 billion. It may be that some portion of that population can only be fed by industrial agriculture. I'm also concerned about the level (not the equality) of medical care available. The CIA and the U.N. disagree on which country has a superior average life expectancy, but they're close enough that when I remove the effect of higher levels of violence in America (as a result of wider gun ownership, and a less law-abiding population--an effect of a more authoritarian state or the greater cohesion of society that you cite?), as well as more car-miles driven (walking and horse-riding having lower levels of fatal injury production), none of which I take to be aspects of the medical system in either country, it seems to me that Americans must get better health care on average than Cubans to be anywhere near the results of their slower-paced society. And what is the point of citing high marginal tax rates under the "Republican Eisenhower?" Is that to imply that Kennedy was a dupe of the bourgeoisie to reduce them following Ike, or merely that the Democrats were wrong to do so? Do you argue that Eisenhower was a better steward of the economy than Kennedy? An absolutely meaningless point, if ever there were one. (And of course, high marginal rates eviscerated by tax loopholes [deductions and credits] that reduce the effective rate of taxation render marginality meaningless, or nearly so, as well.) The truth that underlies your observations is actually quite prosaic: People will always try to find happiness. In a consumerist society, that will be through consumerism. In a post- or pre-consumerist society, that will be in other pursuits. Necessarily, not as a matter of virtue. Whether a society should deliberately deconsumerize in order to prod its people to enjoy nonconsumerist pursuits is an entirely different discussion, one worth having. But taking note that when people have little material wealth, they find joy in the little they have argues, ironically, FOR materialism (subtract the little they have and you are left with, what precisely?). If a joyful existence may be had in the midst of deep poverty, that is testament not necessarily to the superiority of nonmaterial pleasures, but to their mere availability.
Turin 17 Mar 2009, 21:03
"We’re America. We can do this". What typically disingenous liberal bullshit, by one of the many gutless misfits of crapitalism who all find their "niches" in reforming it, rather than ending it. This isn't about consumerism. It's about poverty. Artificial poverty. Artificial poverty caused by decades of cold war, such as the embargo. Take away the cold war, and watch what central government planning can do. Don't expect it to breed the gaudy diseases of capitalism. Using capitalist goals as the litmus for gauging the successes of communism is about as disingenuous as it gets. Kind of like the way the capitalist uses its freaks and its criminal element (of every color collar) to gauge the "happiness" of people in the crime-reduced, more stable communist societies. (After which, of course, they go back to hunting them down, for the same things, on Eighth Amendment-violating police shows...such as, by "rescuing" bimbos from domestic violence ....it certainly breeds those much needed jobs for the spoiled female "needs" driven middle-class inside the empire......no wonder this circus is so threatened by the Taliban). And, yes, the Cuban people are happier with leaner, more introspective lives. No doubt, market places sluts, and other worthless characters, who contribute little to society, other than to create a pointless buzz in everyone's affairs, are behaving as you describe. Cuba is good for them. They would be wayward in a Babylonian society, such as ours. They need a firm guiding hand. There is going to be no "reboot". Just a lot of restructuring. Say good-bye to the white trash bourgeois, that you've known. For one thing, we're probably going to merge economies with Canada and Mexico and implement an Amero for a new currency. I, for one, am for this move. I'm fed up with the hypocrisy of the protectionists who believe that they can use the world, as well as parts of their own country, in which to go slumming and do dirty business but have something nice to come home to. So, go eat shit, you precious "middle-classers". The chicken has landed. The days of "best of both worlds", along with the rest of all of that quaint 1950's nostalgia, are just empty symbols, now. Go hang out at a mall, while you still can, or just send your bratty princesses. Now, we begin to winnow out the weak and the freak. Read, and despair...it's GOD'S judgment that is upon you... :D
Sherri 18 Mar 2009, 13:36
The real weak spot in communism is that it has had to establish itself
against foes who specialize in the plunder of wealth, weapons and talent
while limited to an honest zero-sum budget. If it can win the cold wars
then it will usher in a new golden age of progress and human endeavor.
John Q Blogger 18 Mar 2009, 15:53
The communist government of China has invested a trillion dollars in the
U.S. economy. Most of the products we consume in the USA are made in communist China. The global free trade has enriched communist China.
Turin 18 Mar 2009, 16:56
1. 2. 3. ...We understand that you're afraid to draw the only obvious conclusion. However, your service to the party is noted.
Sherri 18 Mar 2009, 17:16
Of course! China is winning the cold war! You didn't think he would use his
own name to try to challenge Marxist economics did you? :)
Turin 18 Mar 2009, 19:19
Not, exactly. It's typical capitalist propaganda to handle these debates
by setting up all opposing ideologies as two dimensional propositions,
while reserving the convenient right to treat crapitalism with the kid
gloves of rhetoric ...I.e.: with blurry and grey logic. From there, it's a
simple matter of targeting the superior challenger at any point that
presents itself. Any one seeming hole that can be punched in it, becomes a
complete defeat for the hypocrite. Emotional rhetoric vs. factual logic
...whichever best suits your cause. It's also always hilarious how, whenever China is doing whatever they like, then, China is a nation going capitalist. But, whenever it isn't, then, they're back to being a "COMMUNIST" country, again. Lmao
Jonas 18 Mar 2009, 21:38
So? If China is investing in capitalist economies then doesn't that shoot
to hell the idea that communism is a zero sum game?
Turin 18 Mar 2009, 22:55
No, because said investment is being done in order to hold their own
against the cold war encroachments of imperialist capitalism. Zero sum is
being used as a way to describe communism's preferred internal economy. And, history shows how long communist societies have kept the faith before the attacks from without have forced these tactics of survival. This isn't a crutch to supplement any supposed failures of Marxism. It's a way of competing with the attrition tactics of an ideological enemy. By the same token, if capital-schism is such a rip-roaring success, then why does it require free trade, endless expansion and investment from communist countries? Do we accept the fornicating nature, of the mixing of disparate (or any) economies, as a legitimate expression of capitalust principles? Or, Can a test of crapitalism's viability allow the imposition of borders and limits as to who it trades with? Whether, those be borders of a nationalist nature or allowing for trade with other capitalist states? I say you, NO. Capitalism, itself, is supposed to be "self" regulated within the concept of contracts. I don't believe that it's intellectually valid to enclose it within some "anything goes/survival of the fittest" definition, when being judged outside of it's own framework. Otherwise, it's nothing more than a loud crybaby, talented at playing on the feelings and gullibilities of others in order to have itself exempted from rules whenever they aren't convenient ...by means of hook and crook. That's, basically, the truth about the whole disgusting system. As the machine in the movie said about humans not really being the mammals that they masquerade as: It's a virus, instead. It doesn't establish an equilibrium with it's environment. Instead, it consumes all available resources until it's forced to expand. Capitalism is a virus that "consumes". It may hold up responsible ideas, like tree farms in order to pacify it's critics, but replenishing isn't something that it specializes in... It's a disease ...A scummy disease that brings out the worst in humans. Economics *are* a zero-sum game. There are simply the intelligent people who know it and there are the fools who believe that we don't have a finite amount of resources. This is the type of economic theory that eventually led to all of those empty air "derivatives" that broke capitalism about six months ago, on a global scale. We finally began expanding all the way to our global limits. It became too difficult to masquerade the losses by shuffling them around under the guise of pointless "economic activity". *..Crash!*
eaglefarm 19 Mar 2009, 00:37
First a definition of "Professor of Journalism": Comrade in charge of recruiting, indoctrination and training of propagandists for the american Communist Party aka democrat party. Exactly how many citizens of the Soviet Union were murdered by Lenin and Stalin in the name of Communism? Do you think the current owner of the democrat party, George Soros from Hungary, was/is affiliated with Vladimir Putin the head of the KGB in the former Soviet Union? Do you believe these men to be reformed communists? Turin, though you obviously believe yourself to be one of the anointed, do you think that if in control of the government, the communist party would invite you to join, you do know that it's by invitation only in countries that they govern don't you? But who am i but one of the benighted lower middle class bourgeois that holds a copy of the constitution and the bill of rights and understands their significance in the scope of human history. Turin, do you think that we would stand by and let the likes of you lead us down the path to a two bit dictatorship/monarchy. There are too many of "us" and our fathers and grandfathers buried on battlefields around the world that gave their lives so that gnats like you would have your first amendment right to voice your opinion, however foolish it might be. By the way, is that feces dripping off your chin and onto the front of your shirt? Remember, Lenin fondly referred to the rank and file of the party as "Useful Idiots" Einstein when queried about the university staff at Princeton: "Ah Yes, Pompous asses on stilts" Always Faithful.
Sherri 19 Mar 2009, 15:42
Turin, I think someone is having a meltdown today. Nice propaganda though
ya know?
Hap Klein
18 Apr 2009, 14:37
Professor Niman makes some excellent observation about consumerism and its
affect on the world environment and economy. It follows on the heels of the
recent realization that mostly since the late 1970's we have been
increasingly borrowed money from China to buy their goods and Arabian oil.
If we were a drunk doing the same sort of self destructive transfer of
funds our families would strap us into a chair in an isolation booth. But I have problems with connecting the American experience with Cuba. Yes it is great that cuba has developed an agriculture model that should be adopted world wide. At the same time they have a healthcare system that we could do well to emulate. But I always find it troubling that with a most fragile economy and required to be a hand maid to the Soviets when they were at their worse in the 1960's the Cuban Government still kept trying to export revolution by actually fostering and supporting rebel groups in south America. The groups themselves were often led by Cuban "experts," who often had limited experience and training which helped bring a short life to the movement. But it was expensive and did cost the Cuban people resources that might have helped develop a better world for themselves. In the end we are destroying many lives and hopes through extreme greed at the top and consistent greed through our own constant acquisition of vinyl and electronic gew gaws that after a year line the streets in trash heaps. But Cuba pays its price by stubborn ambition at the top and a repressed population that will have to struggle with a new future once the current leadership is buried. Sad era for a beautiful place and people. Leave a Comment:
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