If you spend an hour both ways in traffic, and work an average day, 65% of your waking hours are spent in the service of your employer. More, if you take your work home.

Of the time spent laboring at work — loosely 50% of your waking hours — on average, half of that will be compensated in proportion to your labor.

That means that 25% of your waking hours are spent laboring solely for the benefit of your employer.

Meanwhile, while they’re taking credit for half your work, and you’re wasting 25% of your waking hours for nothing, there is no guaranteed benefit to you based on the success of the company, which has benefitted from your labor.

If you choose to take a risk on starting your own business, you will go immediately into debt; meaning a negative balance from your business is guaranteed, and if you make any money a good chunk of that will go to paying debts. Half of all small businesses fail in their first year; 95% over the course of five years.

For a wage employee, the implications of this mean the difference between relative comfort and destitution. For those with existing capital, the risk is placed on disposable income. While the loss of their investment may be unpleasant, it is not devastating. They can take risks, and reap the rewards, precisely because their futures are assured. If their money is based on a trust or an inheritance, any notion that their wealth is in proportion to their contribution to society — or even their cunning — is void.

If they do make money, it will be at the expense of their employees, which they are paying half of what their time and work is worth. The employees, not having an investment in the company (having no capital to invest if they wanted to) will not benefit in proportion to the success for which they are responsible, except at the arbitrary discretion of their employers.

The carrot on the horizon is retirement at 65. The median life expectancy (based on variations in class and race) of an american male is about 75. The last ten years of your life will be your own; your youth will be gone, many friends will have died, and your children will have grown up and left. This is all assuming, of course, that you have a savings. And if you do, circumstances like illness could easily wipe that out.

The reason most people tolerate this disparity, and even admire their social betters, is because they all imagine themselves in that position. Despite the overwhelming improbability of it, they believe they will miraculously transcend their economic class.

The result of this is the rejection of policies that would directly benefit them, though to the slight and manageable detriment of the wealthy. A good example of this is the massive reduction in taxes on the wealthy introduced by Reagan; undermining FDR’s policies which made the so-called “American Dream” — including home ownership, vacations, and retirement — attainable. Other examples include the subsidization of large corporations, for which the rich and poor are not paying proportional amounts in taxes. Lobbying by private businesses has made the will of the common person — 98% of the country’s biomass — irrelevant.

Policies such as free public healthcare could drastically reduce the number of deaths not prevented due to lack of health insurance; which currently stands at 20,000 annually. Not only could it help with urgent and costly medical needs — which throw those families permanently into debt when they couldn’t afford insurance in the first place — but such access would make preventative care feasible, thus reducing the number of illnesses that become critical (and expensive).

Americans spend little time thinking about, and even less doing something about, the fact that this government’s policies, which represent the interests of corporations, are actually responsible for tens of thousands of deaths and bankruptcies every year. They even cheer it on. It’s as though they’re approving of the inclusion of a single life raft on a ship carrying 400 passengers because they each think they’re going to be one of eight people that will be in it.

With inheritance, public subsidies (the bailout), college legacy programs, and cozy relationships with elected officials, the point of contention that makes economic disparities palatable for many Americans — the idea that wealth is always proportional to merit, the basis of laissez faire and free market rhetoric — is fraudulent.

This raises the question of the purpose of an economic system, and for that matter the purpose of a society. The current economic and political systems aren’t the only kind that could have been instituted. If one’s priorities are increasing the margin between the fortunate few and the moribund masses, then the current policies make complete sense. The logic behind what’s essentially a serf being rabidly in support of this eludes me. Businesses like co-ops, where the risks and rewards of shared among the actual laborers, make much more sense to me. A system that places priority on the health and well being of the populace makes sense to me.

“teacher, starve your child / p.c. approved, as long as the right words are used.”
manic street preachers, “p.c.p.”

no one is innocent in the altercation. before reaching the core of this movie’s premise, the death of vincent chin, we’re forced to confront the circumstances leading up to it. by all accounts, he had an active role in what ultimately happened that night.

at first.

two days from his wedding, throwing himself a bachelor party with a few buddies, it’s easy to picture chin’s impulse to add a few invigorating bruises to the night. souvenirs to accompany his hangover and face full of stripper glitter to greet him in the mirror on a shameful and proud walk from the floor to the shower tomorrow morning. a few lasting mementos of what he’d leave behind, ostensibly for the rest of his life.

if only he hadn’t picked a fight with a couple of psychotic crackers in an industrial piss town that is, of all things, proud to make american cars. imagine. worse yet, he had to go and win that fight. against both of them. by himself. then the bastard went and made the fatal mistake of superficially resembling one of those crazy japanese that don’t sleep, eats nothing but rice and human flesh, and is building cars the size of matchbooks you can buy in packs of twelve. of course it was reagan, not competition that killed what made living in america decent by western standards, but i digress.

it’s hard to piece together the scene from the stories, but especially who witnessed what and when. a black cop said he thought that the white guy, parading around in a parking lot at night in a predominately black neighborhood with a louisville slugger, was coming back from a game. another black cop pondered the beating aloud, detailing the level of force and style used by ebens to bring the ash wood club down onto vincent chin’s head to split it open.

the fight had started at the improbably named “fancy pants” strip club over the looks and/or abilities of a stripper called “starlene.” ebens couldn’t abide a comment made by chin about starlene (chin starting shit, like i said), calling chin a “little motherfucker.” words were then traded between the two men, and ebens, finally showing his hand — his sympathy for his unemployed dumb fuck son-in-law’s plight — said something like, “it’s because of you little fuckers that we’re out of work!” starlene was black, so it could be argued that having her as a favorite dancer doesn’t make ebens a racist asshole in any traditional/mainstream/caricature sense, though many racists simply insist that people know their place; so it could be speculated that straddling a filthy metal column in a dank purgatory like fancy pants is an acceptable place for a girl like starlene, in a way that being seen with him in public would not be. he pretended not to know her name when interviewed next to his wife, though that could just be his mundane domestic duplicity rather than any complicated racial dynamics.

the facts that not even the murderers dispute are such:

the fight continued to simmer into the parking lot of fancy pants. ebens went after chin with a bat, but chin bailed when he saw this wasn’t the fist fight he’d seemingly wanted. ebens and nitz somehow get their american car started and sputtered after chin, searching for half an hour (i’ve read they paid a guy $20 to help look). when they spot him in the parking lot of a mcdonald’s, nitz wrestles him into a hold, and ebens wails on the unarmed man with a baseball bat until he’s unconscious. according to the paramedics, chin’s brains are seen on the asphalt. he was dead four days later.

whites may have been a small minority in that neighborhood, as the policeman said, but the grim resignation of local non-whites to ronald ebens’s actions echoed the dead, resigned weight of the staggering ratios of blacks to whites in the mid-nineteenth-century south. a dim-witted managerial prick like ebens would have done well there. no one wanted to call ebens what he was: a filthy murderer. and his loser son-in-law the willing accomplice.

starlene could only go on and on about how ebens was a fan of hers, like anybody could give a shit. a procession of local hicks all testified that ebens and nitz were not racist, ebens had even known chinks in the past that he didn’t beat to death with a stick. they emphasized this, as though this was the fulcrum on which the question teetered, and not whether a deliberate effort was made to locate and bludgeon an unarmed and restrained chin. as far as the beating itself was concerned, everyone just wanted to pretend it was a natural progression for a bar fight, or that he’d only meant to beat him nearly to death, not all the way. as if changing the subject to tolerance or philosophizing about saloon culture could somehow make it go away for the highly inconvenienced ebens and all those other assholes.

“These weren’t the kind of men you send to jail… You don’t make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal.
“Judge Charles Kaufman [via Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams]

the handling of the case was a joke: evidence not introduced, credible eyewitness testimonies skipped. the imbecile judge kaufman had taken the calvinist route, and anointed the two elect with the handle of his gavel. they got probation and a fine: a suitable punishment for burning leaves or pissing on the alamo, but not so much a deadly beating.

if the roles were reversed, chin would have been crucified. you know that.

the circus of minority advocacy groups that finally converged on the case got it to the federal court, further inconveniencing the already heavily inconvenienced ebens, forcing him deeper into hysterical paroxysms of self pity. but again, the two assholes walked away free, and we learned the value of a chinaman’s life in early-eighties detroit.

the black reporter being interviewed said it all. a sardonic smile twinkled, then slowly faded into solemn recognition. he said when he first looked at the jury, he knew what the outcome would be.