Let Them Eat Olives

Dear Mr. President,

Last evening I walked with a friend through what used to be the old Barbary Coast. The first time I visited, as a sailor many years ago, it was a raucous place, crowded with visitors and local denizens, bars, cabarets, cafes and strip joints lining the streets, a cacophony of light and sound. But last night the streets were deserted except for one homeless man in a doorway eating from a jar of olives. He offered us one as we passed by. The area has been taken over by shi-shi antique shops and high-priced interior decorators and architects who cater to the 1%. The only indication of what had been, were a few bronze plaques embedded in the sidewalk proclaiming, “Barbary Coast Trail.” It struck me as a metaphor: the 1%, no matter where, who always squeeze out the 99%, get rid of the riff-raff, “gentrify” and “revitalize” seedy neighborhoods for their own benefit. What I saw last night however, was not an improvement; instead, it was a dead neighborhood without vitality or life, strangled out of existence by money, power and intolerance. This morning I read that the records accounting for $475 million of fuel purchased for the Afghan National Army are missing, probably shredded. The fuel, of course, was paid for with U.S. taxpayer dollars and much of it went into the pockets of Karzai’s corrupt cronies. Moreover, the fuel bill this year, again paid for with U.S. taxpayer dollars, is projected to be $555 million and there is no adequate record-keeping system in place to track it. Compared to the trillion dollars a year we spend on defense, $475 or $555 million is chump change, but that’s still a lot of money and it could do a lot right here at home in cities teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and help for the unemployed who have run out of unemployment benefits with no jobs in sight. It struck me that Afghanistan and every other country—Russia, the U.K., Italy, Mexico even—has their own 1% and they’re doing just great, thank you. In Afghanistan and other places, the Robber Barons take robbing literally but everywhere it’s a new Gilded Age for them, made possible by government subsidies, secret trade agreements and special tax breaks. Like Karzai’s cronies in Kabul, the merchants, decorators and architects of the old Barbary Coast are doing very well as are their 1% clients who always do well and right now are doing phenomenally well. But then, there’s that homeless guy hunkered down in the doorway for the night, eating his jar of olives…