Reading the Old Testament or the Qur'an involves reading stories about nomadic peoples- people who did not developed settled farms, but instead took their cattle and roamed in search barren wasteland for grazing land and water. This was preferred to joining civilization, because at the time civilization mean slavery to a king who worked you in their fields until near-death, and then taxed the hell out of you. However, with their freedom, nomads faced a new kind of slavery: to that of dependence upon the luck of scratching out a meager existence by luckily stumbling upon water and grass.
Needless to say, there were tons of battles of rights to grazing land and wells. These battles lead to the have-nots conducting raids on the haves, in a raid the Arabian nomads called the "ghazu". It was not out of hatred, but a kind of national sport, with fixed rules that limited bloodshed and avoided murder, as that would lead to retaliation.
Finding out that the Prophet Muhammad took part in some of these raids once he fled civilization (he fled the political and religious elite there were trying to kill him and stamp out his small following of women, slaves, and other people considered the bottom of society). This leads to judgments and false dichotomies: Islam is a religion of violence, Christianity is a religion where at least its leading figure was all about peace. Actually, you and I are just as violent as Muhammad was. In fact, we are worse:
Wait, what?
Our middle-class lifestyle is only possible due to low-costs of goods and services. Those low costs come at a price that I will explain. Thus, our lifestyle increases poverty for the people our cost-cutting and land-grabbing happens at the expense of. Modern life now, as then, runs on the ghazu raid.
(in no ways a comprehensive list)
1. Treating Black and Latino people like we did Native Americans during the Expansion into the West:
Wait, what?
We live in condos built in neighborhoods near hospitals and universities that the city gave huge tax relief to (including 30-year-tax abatements near Rutgers University), but the low-income people who were there first cannot afford to live in them- despite the fact they helped pay for it with their tax dollars.
We go to colleges and work at hospitals built on former housing projects of struggling Black people, while these eds-and-meds do not often hire locally, and they often price out the local citizens. And these projects are given tax relief at the expense of the low-income people who were there first (Rutgers University, John Hopkins University, etc.). Former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who was accused by the Justice Department of the United States in 2006 for racial discrimination in his apartments, is just one example of overt discrimination- though a lot of the times the language is coded as "those people."
We gentrify neighborhoods. According to the American Housing Survey's study of NYC, in 2003 alone, 225,000 renters were forced to move out of their neighborhood for financial reasons. Of those 225,000 renters, 96,000 of them were directly displaced either by their landlord or a government official.
Banks and landlords play a big role in this, in an extraction economy that feeds on the most vulnerable. And the banks that crashed the economy in 2008 had a pattern of exploiting vulnerable Latino immigrants who spoke little English, as well as Blacks; Wells Fargo paid $175 million to settle a racism lawsuit. Even without overt discrimination, the housing crisis lead to many foreclosures, which in turn decreases the property value of those around the home, in a ripple effect that turns many Black and Latino communities into graveyards where the remaining people are stuck because they cannot sell their homes (or, if they can, at a loss). In the end, so much wealth had been plundered by banks that after the crisis, African-Americans and Latino-Americans lost an astounding amount - over half- of their wealth- while whites only lost 16%!
We go to colleges and work at hospitals built on former housing projects of struggling Black people, while these eds-and-meds do not often hire locally, and they often price out the local citizens. And these projects are given tax relief at the expense of the low-income people who were there first (Rutgers University, John Hopkins University, etc.). Former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who was accused by the Justice Department of the United States in 2006 for racial discrimination in his apartments, is just one example of overt discrimination- though a lot of the times the language is coded as "those people."
We gentrify neighborhoods. According to the American Housing Survey's study of NYC, in 2003 alone, 225,000 renters were forced to move out of their neighborhood for financial reasons. Of those 225,000 renters, 96,000 of them were directly displaced either by their landlord or a government official.
Banks and landlords play a big role in this, in an extraction economy that feeds on the most vulnerable. And the banks that crashed the economy in 2008 had a pattern of exploiting vulnerable Latino immigrants who spoke little English, as well as Blacks; Wells Fargo paid $175 million to settle a racism lawsuit. Even without overt discrimination, the housing crisis lead to many foreclosures, which in turn decreases the property value of those around the home, in a ripple effect that turns many Black and Latino communities into graveyards where the remaining people are stuck because they cannot sell their homes (or, if they can, at a loss). In the end, so much wealth had been plundered by banks that after the crisis, African-Americans and Latino-Americans lost an astounding amount - over half- of their wealth- while whites only lost 16%!
2. Having Our Businesses Cut Corners and Mark Up Prices to Cut Costs:
Wait, what?
We set out to cut costs of labor (exploitation- see Wal-Mart here here and here and Driscoll strawberries as just two examples of corporations who do this) and cutting corners of regulations (like VW) , outsourcing to third world wage slaves or hiring people under the table to work for cheap(see the U.S. trade policy NAFTA which created malquiadoras - global corporations formerly in the US but now right near the U.S.-Mexico border, on the Mexican side, where human rights abuses of workers are rampant), disposal (illegal dumping; see how European countries treated Somalia- we dumped tons of trash off their coast and thus inspired the birth of Somalian piracy, which initially was to fight off illegal European dumpers), and craftsmanship or lack thereof (making things far less than durable, cutting corners where we really need regulation, outsourcing to countries that have no regulations- again see NAFTA), overbid contract jobs (and keep what is left over for ourselves), price gouging (see here for just one example in the prescription drug market to gouge AIDS and cancer patients, not even getting into the gouging that occurred by companies during Hurricane Sandy)
3. Ensuring the Avenues to Getting Rich are Paved with Raiding:
Wait, what?
we work for Silicon Valley(which depends products made in China by factories so exploitative of workers that they installed suicide nets and punishments for workers who tried to commit suicide- see FoxConn), Wall St. (which...just see the film Inside Job), play for the NBA (Nike uses slave labor; the NBA got in trouble in 2014 for selling clothes made by wage slaves in Burma) or NCAA (which exploits its own players, mining them for millions and not paying them a penny, and in fact suing them if they try to make money off of their fame) or play soccer(soccer balls are made from slave labor) to try and get rich
4. Using Corporate and Government Turf Wars and Acquisitions as Raids:
Wait, what?
We have aggressive mergers and acquisitions (see the aggressive war for Family Dollar; google "hostile takeover"), trade wars, currency wars, vulture capitalism (see Bain Capital, Mitt Romney's former company, which preyed on corporations who were falling apart), disaster capitalism (see the book of the same name; after natural disasters, the land which corporations had been gunning for but was the site of poor people's housing is now cleared for their takeover), redistricting, eminent domain, the corporations behind big corporate projects (the Keystone XL pipeline are currently trying to kick Americans off of land they want in an aggressive manner).
And then there is the old-fashioned bribe for privileged status, such as Wal-Mart's recent bribe to Mexico to locate their superstore on the national grounds of a pyramid.
And then there is the old-fashioned bribe for privileged status, such as Wal-Mart's recent bribe to Mexico to locate their superstore on the national grounds of a pyramid.
5. Ensuring American and Western Europe is Still an Empire:
Wait, what?
we elect leaders who install puppet governments and have Western education and Western loan-and-debt-relief institutions (such as the International Monetary Fund- the IMF) make the political process and debt relief in the 3rd world as elite so that future politicians are brainwashed to believe in, or can't avoid,
neoliberalization (pro "free-trade") that will let U.S. corporations extract resources. See the movie Blue Gold: World Water Wars; see Coca-Cola in India; see U.S. propping up of right-wing dictatorships in Latin America and Britain doing the same in Iran; see the very recent Wikileaks about Royal Shell gasoline company infiltrating the Nigerian government; see how quickly U.S. oil contractors were in Iraq after our illegal war there; Former Prime Minister Michael Manley was elected on a non-IMF platform in 1976. He was forced to sign Jamaica's first loan agreement with the elite Western institution the International Monetary Fund in 1977 due to lack of viable alternatives-- a global pattern common throughout the Third World.
and sell them to the U.S. while simultaneously flooding the country with cheap U.S. goods to put local businesses out of business (see U.S. corn in Mexico; U.S. milk in Kenya; U.S. garments in Africa),
6. Brainwashing -
Wait, what?
We Aggressively Acquire the "Loyalty" of Consumers: We add sugar and other addictive things to our foods and drinks (and then market it to children), we use sex to ensure the limbic system (our animal brain) hijacks our prefrontal cortext (our human brain) in order to get people to buy our products all while turning women into mere bodies in the media so that a whole gender is turned into a prop just for cash, we use subtle techniques in advertising taught by neuroscientists and psychologists to influence decision making,
7. Demonizing Those Who More Baldly Raid While Overlooking the Fact Our Country Was Built by Raiding and by Hustling:
Wait, what?
I wrote a blog about how America's founders, like the 7th century Bedouins, hustled. Some of it was noble- in order to support the fact they had to abandon their farms during the revolution (Abigail and John Adams ran a hustle where they overpriced goods they sold on the black market), or to support their retirement (George Washington selling drugs just for the profit motive) they hustled. Some was less noble- to sell more farmer's almanacs (Ben Franklin, the liar) (rich land speculators likeThomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson who double-dealed the Native Americans). I compared the way they are treated against the modern-day Bedouins of America in terms of scarcity - people of color in inner cities (whose unemployment rate is always double that of white people) - to highlight America's racist hypocrisy on hustling - the modern ghazu - to survive.
8. Having our personal ghazus-
Wait, what?
Binging (on food, social media, drugs/alcohol, entertainment shows) at the expense of our bodies, and Over-shopping and Hoarding at the expense of our financial or space situations, Stealing people's significant others, the list goes on
but we middle-class and upper-class really have no need to do all this (1-6 on that list), since we are all better off than people actually on the brink of starvation. Later on, we will learn that Muhammad would not go on ghazu raids, unless they were against the wealthy elite who had declared war on him and his followers. Also, Muhammad's successor would cancel the punishment for stealing during a time of famine. The ethics of the ghazu, and of the first Muslims, in regard to a response to scarcity, seems more enlightened to me than our own ghazus.
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