A Visible Need For Democratic Socialism
9:30 PM on a Tuesday night, the streets wet and dark with the rain from earlier this evening, the streets of downtown Vallejo are quiet. A car drives down Georgia Street every so often, but little else stirs. Under the eaves of the City Hall rest several homeless people, one sleeping in a wheelchair. Forty or fifty feet away, along the wall of the nearby library, several more homeless people are trying to rest. Sally, seeing me walking past says “Who are you?”, her jaw showing the wear of many years of alcoholism.
Many years ago, Vallejo was home to the Mare Island naval base, which was closed in 1996. For more than 100 years, this town had identified itself as a navy town. When that suddenly ended, around 6000 jobs were lost. “We couldn’t believe we would be closed,” said Vallejo resident Tom Watson. “We thought we were the №1 shipyard in the country. That’s what the Navy was telling us. We thought we had a job for life — even though the old-timers were saying there were rumors the base would close, we didn’t believe it.”[1]
More than 20 years later, Mare Island is littered with abandoned buildings, doors chained and padlocked, graffiti on walls. In places where the cracked pavement stops, overgrown weeds hide beer bottles and other trash. Parts of Mare Island have been improved. Tuoro University, on the south end, is a bustling center that teaches students medicine. There are some renovated houses and art studios. Parts of the island look quite homey. But Vallejo never fully recovered from the loss of Mare Island.
About a mile and a half away, by sea, from the waterfront at the end of Georgia Street, lies the site of the Old Sperry Mill. The proposed home of a cement factory, infamously known to residents as VMT/Orcem (Vallejo Marine Terminal). Should this factory be successfully opened, it will pollute the air with particulates from the crushing of slag, over an area wide enough to cover a large swath of residences and multiple schools. These particulates will raise the incidences of asthma by at least 50%. The majority of people I’ve spoken with are vehemently opposed to the factory, despite the promise of jobs.
At meetings of Vallejo’s city council, where the cement factory is to be discussed (and I’ve been to several) you can find standing room only, as the people line up to speak against the factory. “They call it “green” cement, but there’s nothing green about it”, says Vallejo’s Jay Gunkelman, a scientist who has been refuting (at council meetings) what he calls “bad science” and “fake environmental impact reports”. “It isn’t going to bring THAT many jobs”, says Peter Brooks, the President of an activist group called Fresh Air Vallejo, which is organized around stopping the Orcem cement factory.
And yet, despite popular opinion against the project, the 7 member city council voted to explore the option of allowing Orcem in, which has locked the residents into a years-long battle, which must legally be carried to the end, in order to avoid a potential lawsuit from the company. An activist who prefers to go unnamed explains “Even before they were named JumpStart, the Napa-Solano Labor Council buys off the Vallejo candidates and have asked potential candidates in the past, “If we endorsed you, will you stay bought?” (referring to an endorsement interview involving former Vice Mayor Stephanie Gomes)[2].
You see, Vallejo has some of the worst air quality in the area already. Right across the Carquinez Strait, to the south, on the other side of a tiny town named Crockett, is the Phillips 66 Refinery, in Rodeo. Still farther south is the infamous Chevron Refinery in Richmond, known for a disastrous fire just seven years ago. About 10 minutes drive east lies Benicia, home of the Valero Refinery, and across the water from Benicia, southeast of Vallejo, is Martinez and the Shell Refinery. Air quality maps tend to show the worst air pooling up right around… you guessed it, Vallejo.
If you travel across the water to Crockett, you will find what was once a beautiful and bustling town. But after the Hawaiian holders of the cane fields, that sent their sugar to the C&H Sugar refinery here, sold off their interests to wealthier corporations, things got tighter and tighter. Today, downtown Crockett has a small deli and a couple of other restaurants and shops, but is otherwise deserted. They don’t even have a farmer’s market anymore, residents being forced to travel to nearby Pinole to get fresh fruits and vegetables.
Martinez, to the east is doing a little bit better, and has a charming downtown area, but Martinez, like Crockett and like Vallejo, has a shrinking economy with a shortage of jobs. Farther south of Crockett, lie Rodeo and the town of Hercules. One gets the feeling, driving through these two towns, which are basically connected, that if the Phillips 66 Refinery were to close, almost the entire population would be out of work. There are a two restaurants in Rodeo, not too far from the water, and in Hercules, there are a handful of businesses near the freeway off ramp, and that is all.
And yet, in the same Congressional district, north of Vallejo, is Napa, California- wine country. Napa is home to some extremely rich people. Robin Williams, Burt Reynolds and Francis Ford Coppola all have called Napa home at one time (or at least one of their homes). Houses in Napa can sell for more than $1 million, if not more. In Napa restaurants, you’ll find bejeweled women and men in Armani suits, carelessly laughing and sipping $100 a bottle wine at restaurants that serve $30 per plate dinners.
Farther north of Napa, live multi-million dollar estates and vineyards. Its beauty is breathtaking and some of the architecture quite extravagant. For about $150, you can take a care-free balloon ride over the valley. North of Napa, into the small town of Yountville and into the city of Saint Helena, it is beautiful and green. Also extremely expensive. This is one of the most expensive areas in the state to live.
All of this lies within the same Congressional district as Vallejo and the cities to the south, which is interesting. Vallejo, Martinez, Rodeo — these cities are anathema to the wealthy of Napa and Saint Helena. How many times have I heard the phrase indifferently uttered: “We don’t want our town to turn into Vallejo”? In the south, there is a desperate need for jobs, for money to be infused into the local economy to house the unhoused and feed the hungry, and yet in the north, there is an abundance of money, and the voters here are looking for ways to protect their investments and their pocketbooks.
Actually, I skipped over a city. Its a small city of about 20,000 people, called American Canyon, and it’s where I call home. It’s an interesting place to live, right in between Napa and the cities to the north, and Vallejo and the cities to the south. Not as expensive to live in as the cities to the north, its not as blighted as the cities to the south, and has somewhat better air quality. There are a few businesses here, but I frequently have call to travel both to Napa and to Vallejo, so I am constantly faced with this juxtaposition of the two cities.
It is true that Napa is a cleaner city, with much fewer homeless, without much graffiti and with a stronger economy. Vallejo, on the other hand, is one of the most diverse cities in the country, as local leaders like to remind us. The people here are vibrant and involved in what’s going on in their local government in a way that most residents of Napa are not. In Vallejo, people smile and say hi in friendly voices to each other. In Napa, many times people don’t even acknowledge your salutations. I’m not trying to compare the residents of these two cities and say that anyone is better than anyone else. I’m certainly not saying that people in Napa aren’t good or kind. I was raised in Napa from the age of 9. My Mom still lives there, as do many friends, but moving from one to the other, you can see that affluence breeds apathy.
So how can these two cities exist, practically side by side (less than 15 miles apart) with no balance, no evening out of wealth? Yes, its true, Vallejo is in a different county than Napa. Solano County doesn’t have close to the wealth that Napa County gets from its wine and tourism industries. No structure exists to, sort of, share the wealth. There is no cross-county governmental structure, and I’m not sure it would be legal if our “elected” representatives tried to create one. I’m not laying the blame at the feet of our any one person, but when you can drive for 20 minutes and go from poverty to decadence, there’s a problem.
Making our system into a social democracy could fix this. Why do I use the term “social democracy” instead of just the word socialism? So many people seem to be in favor of socialism lately, and that’s great, but many other people are holding on to the belief, propagated multilaterally by our establishment, that socialism means dictatorship. It does not. There are socialist dictatorships, but one does not necessarily mean the other.
First of all, we don’t really have a true democracy, we have more of a plutocracy, an oligarchy, you could even call it a kleptocracy, especially these days. But let’s go on the assumption that it IS a democracy that the United States uses. We can keep our elections. We can, and should, make them even more fair than they have been. The wealthy can even continue to make profits. But, we have to reign in the amount of profit the wealthy can make. We need to cap executive salaries and tie the rate to the rate of the lowest paid employees. We also have to hold the very wealthy and corporations accountable for their taxes- something which we are not doing now. Corporations like Apple, Microsoft and Walmart, to name just three, avoid billions of dollars in tax dodges[3][4][5]. This must stop.
We also must slash our military budget drastically and convert our war economy, which has been artificially extended for many decades, into a peacetime economy. If we do this, and we hold corporations and the ultra wealthy accountable for their taxes, we will have plenty of money in the economy to invest in providing healthcare for all, drastically improving our education system (including paying our teachers a hell of a lot more), taking care of our veterans, raising the amount of benefits given to the poor (in the form of government assistance) and still invest in our infrastructure.
And what happens as a result of all that, if we succeed? WHEN we succeed? People are happier, healthier, better educated and better fed. Families are strengthened, because a lot of the stress is gone. Domestic violence will drop. All crime will drop, as crime is directly linked to both poverty and a lack of education. It is common sense that someone who can afford to feed their family and take their children to the doctor, if need be, would have less need to commit crimes. A better educated population reinvests in society. We will have more people becoming doctors, engineers, computer programmers, rather than choosing to not go to school or to drop out because you can’t afford it, and taking low paying service jobs.
Not only that, a better educated population would be more politically aware. It would be far more difficult for a Barack Obama to lie about being transparent [6] while arresting whistle blowers for espionage[7] or a Donald Trump to give tax breaks to billionaires and lie about it hurting him instead of helping him[8]. Mental illness would be drastically reduced. While none of these solutions can account for brain chemistry- I know that- many people sort of snap when they reach a breaking point. This would happen far, far less. I’m not saying we could magically solve all of our problems, but we can certainly do a hell of a lot better than we are doing today. I hope you enjoyed the reading.
-Jason Kishineff
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[3]https://www.forbes.com/sites/leesheppard/2013/05/28/how-does-apple-avoid-taxes/#41a9be1120a7
[4] -https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-microsoft-avoids-taxes-loopholes-irs-2013-1
[5] -https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/06/17/walmart-tax-havens/28857753/
[8] -https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/trump-tax-plan-benefit-rich/541584/
