Anger II: A Little More on Malcolm X

I took a moment in the last post to poke at Malcolm X, as quoted by Don Hall, and I did want to mention a profound influence Malcolm X had on my life.

I'm actually a big sucker for speeches -- great flourishes of rhetoric like the one I cribbed from after HCR passed, or the one that nearly makes me cry sometimes, LBJ's speech on behalf of civil rights. The part that always gets me is when LBJ says, in his deep southern twang:

There is no Negro problem. There is no southern problem. There is no northern problem. There is only an American problem.

And I know that the moment I was 100% behind Obama was the moment when he cribbed the same speech:

Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.

So I definitely went through a phase where I was hell-bent to uncover all of the great American speeches and be sure to listen to them all -- really listen to them. I had them on my iPod (where they more than once came up on shuffle when I was trying to liven up a party... my social life, she suffers!), and I liked to walk or drive while letting the words really sink in.

Malcolm X's "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech was one of those landmark speeches I came across. And I was most interested by a passage that I had never heard associated with Malcolm X before, which goes like this:

The economic philosophy of black nationalism is pure and simple. It only means that we should control the economy of our community. Why should white people be running all the stores in our community? Why should white people be running the banks of our community? Why should the economy of our community be in the hands of the white man? Why? If a black man can't move his store into a white community, you tell me why a white man should move his store into a black community. The philosophy of black nationalism involves a re-education program in the black community in regards to economics. Our people have to be made to see that any time you take your dollar out of your community and spend it in a community where you don't live, the community where you live will get poorer and poorer, and the community where you spend your money will get richer and richer.

Then you wonder why where you live is always a ghetto or a slum area. And where you and I are concerned, not only do we lose it when we spend it out of the community, but the white man has got all our stores in the community tied up; so that though we spend it in the community, at sundown the man who runs the store takes it over across town somewhere. He's got us in a vise.

So the economic philosophy of black nationalism means in every church, in every civic organization, in every fraternal order, it's time now for our people to be come conscious of the importance of controlling the economy of our community. If we own the stores, if we operate the businesses, if we try and establish some industry in our own community, then we're developing to the position where we are creating employment for our own kind. Once you gain control of the economy of your own community, then you don't have to picket and boycott and beg some cracker downtown for a job in his business.

It's an amazing principle, that's based on the idea that any system can be transformed, given an understanding of the system. Unfortunately, history proved that it wasn't that easy -- probably for similar reasons to the "Move Your Money" campaign that doesn't appear to have much traction (reasons like me).

It's just a pity that this isn't what Malcolm X was known for -- or the parts of his philosophy where he talks about the social health of the community.

Change I: Move Your Money, Move Your Theater?

So, elsewhere, most of the internet is talking about Outrageous Fortune, which so far seems to be a wake-up call about how shitty our industry can be sometimes (see also: How Theater Failed America). Yet again, the refrain I hear is, "Yes, we know it's shitty, but how do we change it?"

That's not to say that solutions haven't been proposed (I'm going to update my list of solutions-heard soon to take into account more things I've heard), but that when the conversation veers back to what's wrong in the world, we have to remember the major question: and how do we change it?

Anyways, Scott Walters put up a brief post a couple days ago comparing our desire to change theater to the nascent Move Your Money movement spearheaded by Huff-Po. He compares it to the desire to decentralize American theater.

I remember when I first really started thinking about the decentralizing theater problem last summer (when I first came into contact with Scott), I felt torn. I thought his idea was brilliant and necessary, to get the arts out of New York/Chicago/Los Angeles and into the nation. I also thought that I would never leave New York City to make it happen.

It reminded me powerfully of a baseball fan on the Daily Show (sorry, I couldn't find the clip) who, in the wake of the Roger Clemens steroid scandal, said, "This has brought shame on the entire sport of baseball... but honestly, I'll have forgotten about this come next baseball season."

It also reminds me of how, no matter how low Congress' approval ratings get, the re-election of incumbents remains above 90% -- because in general, people may dislike "Congress" but they do tend to approve of "My Congressman." And if each person on average thinks their congressperson is alright, but as a mass of congresspeople they seem to continue to do stupid things, then our usual check of elections will not have any effect. It's a systemic problem -- we want to change not our congresspeople, but the system by which congresspeople as a mass become stupid.

When Eugene Jarecki appeared on The Colbert Report, I had the same impression. See, I bank with a big bank: JP Morgan Chase. I became a JP Morgan Chase client when Washington Mutual, my bank, collapsed.

I loved Washington Mutual. When I had a problem with a vendor, I would call them, and they would call the vendor themselves and work things out. I was never on hold for more than five minutes with them. I had great customer service. When they went out of business, I was in Europe.

My credit card, on the other hand, is from Citibank. Citibank are cruel bastards. Every month, they sneak on average $5 of fees. If I call them and threaten to cancel, they refund me the charges. After an hour on hold and only after direct threats. When I went to go look for other credit cards, however, I can't find any that pays me nearly as much as Citibank does -- they're literally bribing me with their cash-back scheme (which pays more than any other credit card I qualify for, even after the fees take away, I've done the math). I've considered simply not having a credit card, just to get Citibank out of my life. There's the chance that, in the near term, when I get a business bank account I might get a credit card for the business, and therefore I won't be running such large sums on my credit card, and can close my personal credit card and just go with my debit card for personal purchases.

At any rate, the comparison between Citibank and WaMu was what really cemented my loyalty for WaMu. Their website was easy to use -- Citibank's was always broken, and for a full year I had to hit the "stop" button halfway through loading or else it would freeze.

Also, I had some experiences previously with another bank that was at one time a "local" bank (they're now national, with the demise of one of the other big banks): Wells Fargo. When I was heading to college, I went to my local Wells Fargo bank and opened an account. Right before I left I suddenly remembered something. "You do have branches in New York, right?" "Of course we do." This was a lie. Although it was possible for me to pay my bills online and get things mailed to me on the east coast, I spend about a third of my time on the West coast and two thirds on the East Coast.

Jarecki would call having local branches to me whether I'm at home in California or at home in New York "a convenience" that I'd have to do without.

When I was in Europe, the financial crisis struck, and Washington Mutual went under. I was terrified. Who would I be banking with? Citibank? That was my worst nightmare: to have Citibank hemorrhaging my personal finances the way they try to hemorrhage my credit card. And would there be a break in services while I was in Europe?

When JP Morgan Chase emerged as the buyer, I was tentative. I had no idea who they were and I'd never banked with them before. I wanted to see what they were like. They handled the transition from Washington Mutual to JP Morgan Chase seamlessly. By the end of the year, I was a happy JP Morgan Chase person. I haven't had cause to call them for support yet because, well, everything worked. There was one day that my debit card didn't work in an ATM, but they'd warned me ahead of time and told me how to work around it.

So when Eugene Jarecki was telling me to leave my bank, I couldn't see a compelling case to do it. I mean, I knew that Big Banks were a problem. But my bank is not a problem! They provide me excellent service and excellent care, at basically no cost (there's no ATM fee, no fee on my banking, using my debit card like a credit card has no fees, and then they pay me interest).

That's the problem with Move Your Money. Individuals act based on individual motives. My choices are not only positive for me, but most of the time they effect the people I know positively, they are good on the economy, etc.. It's only on the very macro-est economic of levels that my choice is bad, because I'm one of many people who are contributing to the existence of a "too big to fail" bank.

So, Scott threw out this suggestion that moving our theater would be like moving our bank, and that's our hope of decentralizing theater. I'm saying it's got some of the same problems.

In theory, in terms of the artistic future of the United States, I think we need to leave New York City. But there are no institutions I love nearly as much as The Public Theater. My home in Orange County, California not only lacks institutions like that, but lacks the audience and the institutions to create such institutions. As Don Hall pointed out, the first domino in the problem is real estate, and Orange County has such an incredible real estate bubble (even now) that the cost of starting up a theater company is inhospitable, especially considering as there are no theaters for rent anywhere (the concept just doesn't really exist), and car culture means that there is no such thing as a cultural center, nothing with which to attract people who you don't know.

Other than that, following the dream of decentralization means that I would basically pick a community at random and wander in. But that's really just a different form of cultural imperialism. If I can't create theater in my own community, then I guess I should just go where I want to be--to the community I want to live in, which is Brooklyn. I love it. I love the people, I love my artistic contemporaries.

It's a problem. And I'm part of it.

Nationalization Holiday?

An idea floated across my mind today. I've been reading a lot about how one of the barriers to nationalization may be an investor run on all the banks--shareholders know that they're going to be wiped out, so they will dump stock in their bank, assuming that their bank is next.

But what if the SEC closed trading during the nationalization period? Obama announces on Monday, "Today we're going to begin a process of restructuring the financial industry, and in the interest of stability, there will be a five-day stock market holiday. Only the Federal Government would be empowered to act, they nationalize the ones they want to nationalize and assure the public that any banks un-nationalized by the end of the holiday will remain un-nationalized.

I wonder how that would play out, though. I really am not sure how investors would respond at the end of the week. I personally think they'd wind up with more confidence at the end of the week, because they'd have more of an assurance that their bank is actually solvent. But I don't know.

Geithner's Bank Plan... Or Lack Thereof?

A lot of debate on the blogosphere about the bank plan (or bank "plan") that Timothy Geithner rolled out. I'm giving the benefit of the doubt to the Administration. Mainly, it seems to me the hesitation of the Administration is belied by the debate between a "solvency crisis" and a "liquidity crisis," and how much of the banks fall into one or the other.

It's unfortunate, however, that Geithner didn't present that honestly and forthrightly, in a way that could still give some confidence to investors. Presenting both possibilities, for instance. Giving a window into their thought process. Leaving us in the cold, playing Treasury-ology, is not very productive. I have faith, as other bloggers do, that Obama and Geithner are privately contemplating nationalization in some places, recapitalization in other places (after all--banks that bust get nationalized whether we want to or not). But the strategy, the philosophy, is unclear.