Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate

We have been nearly fifty days in California. It is a state of geographical extremes: the deserts, the Sierras, the long ocean coast, and the central valleys. It is a great agricultural state, and every visitor ought to travel through the San Joaquin, Imperial, or Sacramento Valleys to see the sources of the food we eat. Go during a harvest and watch the brown-skinned men, women, and children pick our crops, the people we fear and hate but without whom we wouldn’t have such cheap food or any at all. Vegetables, fruits, nuts, rice, milk, meat. It is all here in great abundance, and it is all produced from start to finish by the brown-skinned people. Cheap labor and subsidized capital are the basis of agriculture and most other businesses, and those that own the land and every other bit of capital aim to keep that labor cheap and those subsidies intact. Read More

After reading  The Union of Their Dreams, Miriam Pawel’s fine account of the rise and fall of the United Farm Workers Union (UFW), I re-read an article I wrote for the Nation magazine in November 1977.  In this essay, “A Union is Not a Movement,” I leveled some harsh criticisms at the union and its famous leader, Cesar Chavez.  In response, the union’s chief counsel, Jerry Cohen, one of the major characters in Pawel’s book, threatened suit against the magazine.  At the time I was upset, thinking that maybe I should have been more careful in what I had said.  However, as The Union of Their Dreams makes clear, I need not have been, since everything I said was true.  And then some. Read More

[Note: We have been staying in hostels, and internet connections are poor. So I can’t upload pictures. You can see some on my facebook page, which is public]
The earth in the western United States is flush with minerals. Coal in Colorado and Wyoming. Copper in Arizona and New Mexico. Uranium in Utah and Arizona. Silver in New Mexico, Nevada, and California. Gypsum, potash, trona, and borax in the California, Utah, Wyoming, and Nevada deserts. Lead and zinc in New Mexico. Gold damned near everywhere. Many of these minerals have been and are critical to modern capitalist industry and finance, and so their exploitation was inevitable once our economic system took a firm hold on production and distribution. From the perspective of the native peoples, the workers, and the earth itself, the consequences have been catastrophic.  I will have more to say about native peoples in later posts. But for now, consider the Navajo in Arizona, who not only worked in outsider-owned uranium mines on their land but used mine waste to construct flooring for their homes, not knowing and not being informed of the dangers, as they could and should have been.  Cancer was rare among the Navajo, but now it is epidemic. Read More