Sean Ongley

Category: Writing

Past and Present examples of the writing of Sean Ongley.

  • Democracy and Personal Freedom in Big Finance

    Democracy and Personal Freedom in Big Finance

    Photo of Slovak Radio Building, an upside down pyramidal structure for me represents how we need to build society.

    This is a freewheeling introduction to what should be a series of articles designed to walk a beginner through the daunting field of personal finance. I want to make my motivation, and in a sense, my qualifications clear in this introduction.

    As bad as the outcomes of our economic system have been for average working class folks in the last several decades, including myself, the average American is confronted with greater access to financial investment products than ever. I would advise any young person today to get their first job in High School and start that portfolio before they enter college. It is not a college fund, it is a post-college fund. Or, I would say, “Skip college!” But that’s another argument.

    I am a great example of what is possible for a low-income person. Here is the short of it: I went from, at the beginning of 2017, flat broke, on food stamps, bad credit, and crashing in someone’s basement for free, to, by the end of 2017, keeping thousands of dollars in the bank, a good credit card, and a credit score around 700. I even had a vacation that year. I only made $1,500 a month. By January of 2019, I owned my first home, had a second credit card, a credit score of 750, and several thousand dollars in the bank. I made just a little more that year. We are approaching 2020 and I have my finances diversified over several investments while maintaining an emergency fund, a third credit card, and passive income as a landlord. At this rate, I could retire in twenty years, especially if I stick to a full-time job. I haven’t!

    Beyond personal financial liberation, there is a social-political motivation for me to develop a portfolio. Our capacity to engage with corporations as shareholders is greater than ever. The opportunity to grow personal wealth while supporting companies that we can believe in is also greater than ever. Numerous social challenges confront us, but if each to our own utilize finance as democracy and democracy as finance, then social solidarity can make a difference at the core of the corporations, and possibly spawn startups that would not otherwise see a market without our investments flowing toward positive ends.

    I’m not going to take the time to source my claims here, but I am sure of the following statements: Average incomes have fallen against inflation, homeownership rates have fallen, workforce participation rates have fallen, average household costs have risen, wealth disparity has risen, and corporate profit has risen. Feel free to verify these observations. I am stopping myself from going into climate change and health care. If we each practiced finance correctly then I am positive this would improve.

    There are many problems facing us. We can engage directly from the mature position of shareholder, or we can stand on the sidelines and complain from a social media feed. When you are a shareholder of a company, you have the right to complain. When you are not, you do not. For example, the difference between a regional credit union of which your membership represents a share of ownership versus a major corporate bank of which you are just a customer: One directs profit back to account holders and into local communities more effectively than the other; I will let you guess who.

    If the product you consume from the company, as a customer, does not meet your satisfaction, you may complain, but as far as how that product is produced, you have no leverage. Perhaps a can of coke is just as satisfying as ever, but you want to reform Coca-Cola’s corporate practices. How do you do that? Activism generally includes boycotts, strikes, picketing, and journalism, in the tool box. How about adding participation through investment?

    The stock market is a public, democratic system. Most of the biggest companies are publicly traded: Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Ford, U.S. Steel, etc. If you own just .000001% of Coca-Cola, you still have .000001% of the annual votes. There are votes every year, and various positions are adopted by the Board. Commonly, Board members hold more than 2% of the shares.

    There can be an upside down pyramid so that the masses are directing policy up through the Board rather than what we are accustomed to, where only the wealthiest investors hold influence.

    The more people that own shares the more diverse the set of owners. If ten million Americans own .000001% of Coca-Cola, together they own 10%. They have massive sway, assuming there is solidarity between them, they could even organize and put an activist on the Board with that kind of leverage. 10 out of 300 million, that is only 3% of the populace; they ought to find at least partisan solidarity.

    Fact is, it is easier to open a brokerage account and invest small amounts of money than ever. Only fifty years ago, a single market transaction would cost the equivalent of one week’s average median salary. Now it is free at a range of established brokers.

    I personally use Robin Hood. They offer exactly what I need: a good web-based interface with instant access to my deposits and fee-free trading, including cryptocurrencies. In future blogs I can dig into features within Robin Hood, such as stop and limit orders, fractional shares, and financial management tools.

    It’s not just about opposing a company’s practices, it is also about engaging with a company you believe in. I personally try only to purchase from companies that I care about. I hope my stocks are held in companies that are working on the solutions to climate change and social inequity. Whatever aspects about them I do not like, I feel better voicing that as a shareholder than just someone standing by.

    When you rent your housing, you’re throwing money wherever the person or company you rent from is throwing their money. They may be shareholders in companies you adamantly oppose. There are all kinds of externalities, social and environmental ramifications that we cannot see immediately in the production or consumption of a product or service, associated with our consumer behavior. I believe you should spend your money where you feel good about it, but only after you’ve funded your investments, and your investments should make you feel good.

    My next post will take you through how I evolved from chronically broke to constantly growing my assets. If you have more spare income than me, you’ll be wealthier than me in no time by following my advice.

    If you would like to support my personal finance content then you can join Robin Hood and hook us both up with a free stock.

  • People Love to Talk and Animals Love to Lounge

    People Love to Talk and Animals Love to Lounge

    Pet owners and safari lovers surely notice that the seeming aim of the animal kingdom is to secure time for lounging. Once their bellies are full, there are no to-do lists and frameworks to abide by. For this, we are envious.

    Humans are not so different (myself being one of them I can speak certainly). We go through quite a few extra abstract steps to get there, but ultimately we are trying to lounge. Set aside the extremes, like addicts and clinically depressed folks that cannot get out of bed. Looking at the so-called average person, I would suggest that we have a combined weakness and advantage like no other in the animal kingdom: Language.

    I understand that we are discovering the scope of language across the animal kingdom — notably in dolphins and primates — but let’s face it, gang, our throats and our brains are built for language. It is to the extent that some of us speak many languages, while a select few can do that plus study the languages of the animal kingdom.

    There is this weakness, however, and it is the reality of language. Just think about this. You may spend a full day inside your house, especially during the holidays, doing nothing really but shooting the shit with your family and friends. 

    Look at yourself from a bird’s eye view. There you are, sitting at a table for hours, just making sounds out of your throat and doing nothing in particular. You aren’t lounging, you are probably reliving past experiences, sharing stories, listening and thereby living vicariously through other people’s stories. You may be world traveling and having direct arguments with the President! From your head. We love language because it produces a more exciting reality.

    “Storyline Fever” is a new song out by the late David Berman under the moniker Purple Mountains. He was a genius with language. The realities he spun can be surreal but they frequently take you outside the self and into the primal and universal truth. We can work ourselves up into a fever with language, or transcend ourselves.

    Our brains in western neuroscience are viewed as the seat of intellect and consciousness and this is accurate, but eastern (especially Chinese) science has long viewed that the seat of intelligence and enlightenment is in the heart. The heart does not have the storage capacity that the brain has, but it knows what to do with the information.

    In America, our hearts are separated from the brain, so they are constantly firing out of sequence. It makes for a very messy social-political-economic order. I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds about this, I am observing a broader truth here.

    When we don’t practice the alignment of heart and brain, we are guided excessively by brains. The problem there is that the brain is just relaying possible scenarios. It is the vessel, not the captain. The reality most likely to be accepted with this kind of misalignment will be the one that produces the strongest emotional reaction. Because we are not accustomed to the subtleties of the heart, we only accept the grossest signals.

    The repression of the Chinese through an economic structure forces the heart into submission, although, I would say it is better expressed to say that the heart is captured, as Chinese folks abide in the political-economic order to an unhealthy degree. Their enhanced intelligence is pointed toward totally materialistic aims, because that is the structure of a communist government where religion has mostly been replaced with materialism. The Chinese are crushing it, by the way, because they have long understood how the heart works.

    We really should watch ourselves with the realities we’re spinning with language, in our heads, in our dining rooms, on our Twitter accounts, and remember that our brains are a vessel, not an identity. There in that brain you store your identity. Who owns that vessel? One can only say God because there is no taking that body with you, as we say of our possessions.

    There are volumes written over the course of human history about the argument between the everlasting self and the self-identity associated with the body, that is, spiritualism versus materialism, theism versus atheism. I am a student, not a professor. But we can say something for sure about all this: Watch it. Watch those thoughts, watch those realities, listen to the subtleties in your language, get above the realities you are creating for yourself, and maybe then you can lounge it off.

  • Willy Wonka: A Millennial’s Guide to Economics

    Willy Wonka: A Millennial’s Guide to Economics

    Originally written and published on my personal blog, in 2013, this analysis of the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is humorous but an earnest exploration. It was edited and republished at THRU Media a couple years later. I have taken another proofread to it and I present it again, without graphics, cleanly edited.

    The classic 1971 musical film, Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory is a period piece set in London during the Great Depression. Wait; usually a Depression is set in America. Come to think of it, there are computers and television in the film — those are post-war fancies. One of my favorite scenes involves a technician with a back talking computer that won’t cheat the precise location of the Golden Ticket. The technician is British. Charlie’s teacher is British. The urban locations were actually shot in Munich. Charlie is American, the newscasters are American, Wonka seems to be American as well. Maybe this is intentional to create a more universal sense of place. But since everybody is white, it’s only really speaking to Western society.

    This may seem like a careless analysis, but I could start at any point in the movie. You have seen this film many times. It is a staple to your cultural perspective, if you are from Generation X or Millennial, because it is the most subversive G-Rated film you saw at a young age. It was at every video store, and your Baby Boomer parents remember it quite well because they did acid to it in 1971, and they wanted to blow your mind with it. It’s not that it was a blockbuster hit, it just has lasting power. It has me thinking hard now some twenty years later.

    But we can’t just move on with this mystery looming over our head. Simplify it then. It takes place on Planet Earth in modern political times. Right? It has a way of seamlessly avoiding the precise location of Wonka’s factory, but it’s revealed that it’s within walking distance from Charlie’s route — weird scene early on depicts knife sharpener creep dude saying, “nobody goes in, nobody goes out.”

    The Synopsis

    Poor Charlie Bucket is taken care of by his single Mother, working in some pre-industrial laundry room with washboards and buckets. Charlie is becoming a young man with his first ever paper route. He buys a loaf of bread to go with the cabbage water for dinner that his Mother provides. Their poverty appears ludicrous next to the opening sequence, “The Candy Man Can,” where Charlie basically misses out on all the free candy that all the other kids are having.

    The grandparents, aunt and uncle just waste space in bed as if to represent Depression itself. But Charlie has real affection for Grandpa Joe, notably when Charlie pushes tobacco on him and he turns it down. It makes me think of that naive false altruism that seems to be rampant among the poor — a virtue that is more self-destructive than creative. Charlie’s hunt for the Golden Ticket is given an encouraging morale boost from Grandpa, “You’ll win because nobody wants it more than you.” 

    When the hunt begins for the Golden Ticket, you’re taken around the world where every other kid is enjoying economic opportunities nowhere close to the abject poverty of the Bucket family.

    Enter the spoiled brats; kids with everything and not a fart to give the world. First there is Augustus, the benign German fat boy that takes a bite out of a microphone; the son of a successful butcher. Second up but perhaps the most memorable is English girl, Veruca Salt, heir to a wealthy snack tycoon (Salt’s Peanuts) and so god-awfully selfish that only her Father truly tops it, since he monopolizes the supply of Wonka bars. This gains Mr. Salt access to Wonka’s factory, and Wonka himself, while buying the love of his daughter. Every capitalist knows that would be a significant return on investment.

    Next up, Violet Beauregard, the self-congratulatory nitwit American gum chewer loud mouth daughter of an Automobile Dealer. She may be the loudest and yet most benign of them at this point. And finally there is Mike Teavee, the back talking kid obsessed with television and guns, from suburban Arizona. His seeming middle-class parents have no influence over him.

    The commonality between these characters and their parents is a lack of responsibility and relationship with their kid. They also seem to be only-children, you know, without siblings, but that may only be implied. The kids disrespect their folks, order them around, get all their desires met, and show no apparent sign of maturing into young adults. Whereas Charlie, his family may be poor, totally lacking savvy, and somehow stuck in a Great Depression all to their own, they seem to respect one another, and accept whatever fortune may come their way. This forced Charlie to become a young man. 

    The scene is set. We are all rooting for him. Charlie wins the ticket. All hell breaks loose.

    Introduction to Slugworth. Note the labels on his chocolate in the candy store — boring and unimaginative. You know the ending, so I’ll remind you that Wonka sets these kids up with a chance to share factory secrets, especially, the Everlasting Gobstopper, as a test of their moral virtue. And these are indeed closely guarded secrets. Make no mistake. Wonka is a big time industrialist. But he seems to be independent, as it were, not a Nestlé type. At the time the original book was written, as well as this film, no food stuff corporation existed on the scale of contemporary Nestlé.

    First to get knocked off is Augustus, the boy with no personality but a suit large enough to support two men. He drowns in a river of chocolate. He never even sees the Everlasting Gobstopper. Then goes Violet Beauregard, the gum chewer who couldn’t resist trying the five-course meal. She goes out as an ever-expanding blueberry.

    Charlie nearly gets it. Here is the unique case. Charlie acts as prompted by his Grandfather, his elder, and so is a mere accomplice. But as he floats toward the fan powered by fizzy lifting drinks, you knew it would be the bloodiest spectacle witnessed in the film. However, they belch their way back down. All is well.

    Next to go is Veruca Salt — which is long overdue by this time. She is the bad egg, the one that can’t get the golden goose and throws a tantrum. And so she falls into the bad egg bin of death. Then goes Mike Teavee, who doesn’t die per se; he just succumbs to the undeniable urge to be on television. And so he is miniaturized into oblivion. What keeps it G-Rated is Wonka’s assurance that they all have a 50/50 chance at survival.

    With all the kids knocked off, Wonka thanks Charlie and let’s them go, without the promised lifetime supply of chocolate.

    Here is the dramatic scene where everything in his office is in halves. Joe demands the chocolate, but Wonka screams at them instead. Wonka is wondering how he is going to clean up the death of four children, surely he’s a little on edge. But Charlie does the one thing Wonka wanted: He returns the Gobstopper. Charlie knew that this would betray Wonka, even though he was kind of a dick. “So shines a good deed in a weary world,” says Wonka. And that does it, his other half is fulfilled and Charlie inherits the empire. His family is saved by an industrialist. Then Wonka reveals the floating glass elevator, and they live happily ever after.

    The Analysis

    Let’s go back and consider Wonka’s factory for a moment. Beverages that cause anti-gravity, gum that causes enemies to explode, terror-generating environments (the psychedelic rowing scene), materials that last forever, teleportation technology, geese that lay gold, the UFO-like glass elevator, and an apparently self-sufficient edible biosphere. Perhaps these secrets are paramount to the motivation of people in the global fervor to win the Golden Ticket. Hilarious scenes like a woman whose husband is being held ransom for her case of Wonka bars — and she has to stop and think about it.

    These are military kind of secrets that cause such espionage. There is no way that Government forces could ignore Wonka, unless he managed to keep it all under wraps, or, unless he worked with the government. Or else he’s holding the technology against the government. In which case, he must be a revolutionary in favor of free democracy. Not so, because he went on this search to find a child that would learn his business and ask no questions, with complete loyalty, to become Wonka.

    I’ll be honest, I’m unclear, because I had a much more positive view when I first conceived of this essay. I wanted to stress Charlie’s honesty, integrity, and how that earned him the keys to a magical empire. But then I got to thinking about Wonka. He is apparently unmarried, lives in the factory, and is entirely concerned with his business. The more I analyze him, the more he looks like a sociopath.

    I start to worry for Charlie, because he’s naive, he’s a poor boy; his family always had complacence combined with moral virtue. Wonka is clever, a mastermind. Fake-Slugworth was planted at every location of the winning ticket. It seems to be a massive hoax funded by the temporary monopoly of the chocolate market — a plot to cause diabetes in the foolish. One goal in mind: Find an impressionable child to become his spitting image to carry out the business forever. That is why Wonka did the contest.

    Of course, it is all a story. The mystery behind the turn of events is the glue to the pages that keep it bound. The 1964 book of the same title that the film was inspired from was authored by Ronald Dahl, a Commander of the British Air Force in WWII, and became a best-selling Author in the post-war years. He knows something about military secrets. And this may be the crux of my interest in the whole story.

    I have been thinking a lot lately about the assumption of power that the United States has taken since the end of WWII. Cultural values in America have permanently changed since that time, with propaganda-violence as a profitable form of entertainment. Where the will of the people is not reflected in the legislation. Censorship and wiretapping has become commonplace. We are beginning to take on the features of Fascist Germany. We gained Germany’s secrets and continued developing what the Nazis started, but this time for the good – or so we believe. We understand how power corrupts, and yet we are concerned with being the most powerful nation as if that has always been our national identity. Not so. We were an underdog, concerned mostly with our own industries and liberty, until we defeated Hitler and Imperial Japan.

    Hitler’s military technology was more advanced than any other in the world. European forces just came together with an unscathed United States, rapidly developed new technology, and outnumbered the Germans, who were spread far too thin. The U.S.S.R. gained the other half of the secrets. The two have been employing them against one another ever since, and there is no greater expression to that than the Space Race. That race developed all the key missile systems in use today. This idea is not well researched and so could come off as a flimsy conclusion, but here it goes.

    Wonka is America’s Hitler. That would be a wild way to go, but actually, this is my take. Wonka represents the American Mad Man of The Greatest Generation that created tremendous technologies, entrepreneurism, and power. Charlie is a Baby Boomer. He represents the generation being handed the keys to the most abundant, creative, strange, mesmerizing, cut throat, violent empire the world has ever seen: Post-Modern America.

    I am a Millennial and I relate to Charlie. My world is bleak yet mesmerizing all the same. It’s a world full of automation and high definition media all the time. Yet the whole structure of it, the economy and culture driving it has vastly split the rich from the poor — Charlie lives in his own Depression despite seeing others swimming in candy. My generation is being handed the keys to a vehicle that hasn’t got any gas in it. In other words, the only way to get out of it is to join the elite, no questions asked. That is how we break the glass cieling in our own glass elevator.

    Millennials have to make friends with guys like Wonka, who value honesty and integrity, while steering clear of the deathtraps laid ahead of our path. We, the Millennials and late Gen X, just entering management, have to push through the crash course and come out on top to inherit the kingdom. But beware again; we will soon be setting the deathtraps, inheriting the mania that capitalist-industrialism requires for continuation. 

    Personally, I just want simple social equity and I don’t care about any kingdom.

    By 1973, two years after Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory film, and nearly ten years from the book release, a follow-up was published, written by Dahl, The Great Glass Elevator. I have not read this sequel.

    In 2006, Johnny Depp took the role of Willy Wonka in a remake. I have not seen it and I thought it would compromise the integrity of this essay. After all, it is Gene Wilder that makes the film a real accomplishment. I think the film is a masterpiece. Even to the effects, the sets, and the songs, but Gene Wilder is the only choice and I would bet that Depp really superficializes the character while the script removes all kinds of conceptual goodies like I’ve explored here.

    The only actor I would cast for Wonka today would be Daniel Day-Lewis. This one choice would change everything else. It’s too late for that though.

  • At Least We All Eat Hummus

    At Least We All Eat Hummus

    Originally published at THRU, in March 2015. I highlight this one because it is representative of my approach to dance review, and it shows a side of Israel that we don’t often see. I also really enjoyed this event.

    Last night, two performances were paired together for something that White Bird calls, New Israeli Voices in Dance, presented at Portland State University’s Lincoln Hall. It is part of their Uncaged program and runs through Saturday night. Both of these featured works are minimal in their stage and costume design, which I suspect makes the show possible, financially speaking. Not that such a limitation withdraws from quality, because in the case of these works, it is to their advantage.

    The first, “Exhibit B” by Ate9 Dance Company, and the second, “We Love Arabs” by Hillel Kogan.

    “Exhibit B” starts strong with fast-looping music from Omid Walizadeh, the kind that literally grips your brain. The curtain rises and all dancers are on stage, in pairs. I see a reclusive, meditative pair, two casually sitting and interacting pairs, and one disjointed pair because one is dancing solo at center-stage while the other cleans the floor with a towel. The floor-cleaner is Choreographer, Danielle Agami, making it clear she’s willing to hold her weight in the group. She’s a spry thirty-year old woman, young by the standard of her accomplished career.

    Stage goes black. Music is pounding with industrial-style beats and upfront glitches. In their pink-fleshy costumes (also by Agami) you can make out their outlines scattering the stage, or setting up a new scene. Music continues at full volume during blackouts. These short scenes are not broken up by music, only light. So the energy builds with the music, providing continuity between blackouts. A lighting scheme by Portland’s Jeff Forbes makes for unique moods for every scene.

    In one scene, dancers try to run across the stage, as if a no man’s land, all of them collapsing, followed by another dragging them off-stage. These happen very quickly, but with enough suspense to question what will happen next. One such casualty remains on the floor, followed by someone who steps out for a solo, as if impervious to sniper fire, or whatever it was taking them down. She is eventually gobbled up by all the dancers, concealed, prevented from being known.

    Mysterious meaning like this kept me plagued with thought, which is not always a pleasant experience, even for people who enjoy thought. I am actually on the fence with my interpretation for this one. I review without notes and go in without conditioning—researching only as much as necessary until fingers reach the keyboard—to allow the meaning to digest in dreams, then I tackle the residual impressions over coffee.

    This idea of subconscious information connects to the next performance by Hillel Kogan, who repeatedly states that the audience receives the information (entirely coded into expressionistic dance) and he trusts them to take it and understand it later—whether they know it or not. Before going into the second half, some reflections.

    Ate9 Dance Company could be looked upon as an expression of diversity in itself. Prestigious dance troupes more typically favor a certain body-standard, not necessarily for the concept of sexiness or ethnic purity, but for their predictable movement and appearance—but still it perpetuates the body-race-image complex. Some companies are going against the current and bringing a range of body types and skin tones to their troupe, and Ate9 is forerunning that movement especially because they are located in Los Angeles, CA, a place of great diversity and body-standards juxtaposed, and roots in Tel Aviv, where ethnicity is a constant source of conflict.

    Ariana Daub, I noticed for her personality, brings so much expression. Micaela Taylor brings a determined grace and athleticism—she also has that ready-made dancers’ body. Agami herself brings something fierce. Everyone deserves credit for a powerful new work that premiered on the West Coast last night. If I watched it again, I would look more closely at their expression. In the dazzle of fast-moving beautiful people, being untrained in the language of dance, I now realize how much I miss.

    The second half of this double feature is an extemporaneous performance by Hillel Kogan with Adi Boutros. Kogan masterminds a new work with Adi on the spot. I wonder if, at one time, it wasn’t so well-developed. It is a two-year old work and I think they have worked together on it and have the main events plotted out.

    It is narrated by Hillel, at first to the audience, where he awkwardly tries to explain his struggle in the creation process. I felt like I was receiving secrets from a choreographer about the experience of dance and being a dancer. Physically, emotionally, spiritually–he put that into words, giving the audience a chance to build empathy.

    He has this notion of space that invites and rejects. He wants to find an Arab that he believes the space is inviting. If you follow Israeli politics—and might have after the Netanyahu speech to Congress—then you might have heard the struggling Prime Minister alert his voting base that Arabs were being bussed out in droves. Arabs don’t have much place in Israeli society, especially in Tel Aviv, where both of these dancers work. Although Hillel is not tackling the political process, he is confronting division and a bonding relationship.

    This premise brings Adi Boutros on-stage. From then forward, Adi receives most of the attention. Their interaction is very funny. Hillel is satirizing himself, the expressionist choreographer, yet he is still building a pretty interesting work. In that he almost seems like a hack modern dancer, I think the personality of shallowness helps demonstrate the stupidity of racism. It illuminates the cultural assumptions that The Ignorant embody. His satire is not targeting shallow dancing, it is targeting shallow other-ness.

    Adi frequently broke up in laughter and they both kind of had this secret smirk for the audience throughout the piece. When they finally reach a performance set to Mozart, with a fog machine, after a tedious, funny build-up, it is impressive. Technically, their skill is excellent; Adi appears to be weightless. I think he works on his b-boy skills just as much as modern ballet. The humor that Hillel develops with this ludicrous theme finally comes to a climax with a truly unifying act.

    The two short works paired well together for their variety and totally different pacing, making a satisfying program. I hope you get a chance to see it for yourself.

    Additional Links

    ATE9 DANCE COMPANY: HOMEPAGE
    OMID WALIZADEH: SOUNDCLOUD
    HALLIL KOGAN: ISRAELI CHOREOGRAPHERS
    WHITE BIRD DANCE: INFO PAGE
    ORIGINAL POSTING: THRU MEDIA

  • The Wheel of Contradiction Turns on Yemen

    The Wheel of Contradiction Turns on Yemen

    Analysis of the Yemen crisis recalls a lost narrative.

    This article was originally published at THRU.Media on June 5, 2015, as “Yemen Crisis and the Wheel of Contradiction.” It has been edited for quality without updating information or altering the original narrative.

    The Yemen Crisis only recently grabbed my attention during the usual morning routine of reading the news over breakfast. A story of violence, destruction, extremism, and political crisis breaks nearly everyday. Not only are there too many civil wars going on around the world to keep track of, they tend to read like sports analysis detailing the offense and the defense and how their plays were executed from each side. I’ve been focused on Syria and Palestine, but Yemen has had enough compelling detail to it that I had to carve out a couple days to research and digest the matter. The history of Yemen reveals internal collusion with al-Qaida and the exploitation of the United States War on Terror.

    Before researching this essay, I was only clear on the fact that Saudi Arabia’s air campaign in Yemen was against a militant faction called The Houthis. Now I understand that the Houthis deposed President Hadi from office and palace early this year. Hadi fled to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The Houthis have staked claim over the government by controlling the capitol, Sanaa. Saudi Arabia claims that the Houthis are a proxy force of Iran.

    Rumors of al-Qaida and Islamic State expanding their presence, thanks to the chaos of the scene, have been circulating. Setting the stage is a long time conflict between north and south Yemen, and a corrupt President who used terrorism to maintain power for decades.

    History Coming to Blows

    There is a religious and tribal connection that can be traced back generations, even if the exterior of the conflict is a modern political one. A fair place to begin is the Shia versus Sunni Islam conflict at play: Shi’ite Houthis hold a majority in the north while Hadi comes from the Sunni-dominant south. Iran is majority Shia, Saudi Arabia is majority Sunni. Al-Qaida is Sunni and Houthi is Shia. Both Houthi and al-Qaida roots go back in the 1980’s, and both took a turn with the collapse of Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed government in 1991, with the disintegration of the U.S.S.R.

    Osama Bin Laden operated a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and believed that Yemen had an important role to play in global jihad. His influence produced terrorist groups like Islamic Jihad in Yemen, Army of Aden, and eventually al-Qaida in Yemen, throughout the 1990’s, so that by September 11th, 2001, there was already a history of Yemeni attacks from Islamist militia against western nations.

    Hussein al-Houthi established the Believing Youth movement in 1992 to teach Zaidi Islam through school programs and summer camps. With 20,000 student attendees of the summer camps by 1995, there was a growing cult-like following in reverence of the al-Houthi family. Its teachings included lectures from Hassan Nasrallah, now Secretary General of the Lebanese political party with armed forces, Hezbollah.

    President of North Yemen throughout all of this is Ali Abdullah Saleh. He rose through the ranks with a vicious military career in the Yemen Arab Republic from 1960 to 1980. By 1983, he was President, and remained in that position until Soviet-backed South Yemen collapsed, like Afghanistan. He swiftly absorbed the South and became the first President of the new unity government.

    Saleh worked with the United States as an ally in the region, supporting Kuwait in 1990, and was supported in return for resisting communist insurgencies subsequent to the fall of the Soviet Union. Marxist secessionists sought regional liberation from the rule of Saleh. To squash insurgencies, Saleh utilized unemployed jihadists from Afghanistan trained by Bin Laden. These terrorists would evolve into early al-Qaida formations.

    In 1994, the Vice President of Yemen is appointed by the name of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, recognized for his military role in keeping the secession movement down. His role in the administration is ceremonial.

    Houthis were relatively quiet until anti-west sentiment developed after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. They got Saleh’s attention as their numbers had grown and they had become increasingly armed. Without any particular provocation, members of the movement were arrested. Hussein al-Houthi launched the first insurgency against Yemen in June 2004 and was killed on September 10th. Every year since, there has been some kind of offensive measure from the Houthi movement. By 2011, they played a meaningful role in the revolution that ousted Saleh.

    That revolution was part of The Arab Spring, which is an ongoing geopolitical struggle. It has been a violent process but also led to international reforms and liberated many people from oppressive government rule. The nations still seeing great unrest are dealing with waves of humanitarian crises, civil war, and terrorism. The Yemeni Revolution has been one of the most unstable movements in the bunch.

    Water and Air Strikes

    One major yet ignored backdrop to the whole conflict is that Yemen is experiencing the greatest water crisis in the world. The prospect of Yemen being the first to run out of water has been rumored for many years, and yet, to this day, nothing is properly being done about it. Post-revolution reforms were met with a lack of political will from Hadi’s government. Social instability is a massive distraction.

    In a nation where 75% of men are addicted to a legal stimulant-narcotic known as qat, where food crops are being replaced by the demand for and profit from qat, where water drilling is unregulated, where cultivation of qat is estimated to be responsible for as much as half of the disappearing water table (6.5 feet per year), where nearly half the population is hungry, there is a severely torn social fabric, communities are reeling and desperate, and something has been deeply corrupting the government.

    For about one year after the revolution, Saleh remained President but essentially powerless. His successor, Hadi, was elected amidst unrest and instability. He was unopposed. By 2014, it seemed that his rule, though flawed, was likely to continue with reelection in 2015. This is when the Houthis started to dig in.

    Houthis rose to victory, building their control and support from the north, and in the summer of 2014, they descended upon the central capitol of Sanaa. On January 22nd, Hadi was run out of the Presidential Palace, resigning from office along with his entire cabinet, escaping to Riyadh, where Saudi Arabia took him as the President-in-exile. Abdel Malik al-Houthi became the first President of the Revolutionary Committee of Yemen.

    When they took the city by force and marked their territory like a gang, dissolving parliament and forming this farcical Revolutionary Committee, a considerable portion of the Yemeni public, Arab Gulf Cooperation Council, and United Nations called it an unwelcome coup d’tat.

    It took about two months of failed peace talks mediated by United Nations for Saudi Arabia to intervene militarily. The UN condition was that Hadi would remain in office and his government would be restored. That is a difficult pill to swallow, so it is understandable that Houthis would capitulate. February and March continued without the successful formation of a new government. Al-Qaida and Islamic State would infiltrate the insecure nation, to simultaneously fight the Houthi uprising and thwart the return of Hadi’s regime.

    Before Hadi was rushed out of the country, Houthi protests in Sanaa were violently squashed with security forces under Hadi’s command opening fire on peaceful crowds.

    Rutgers Associate Professor of Middle East studies, Toby Jones, speaking on Democracy Now, points out that Yemen has been a fractured, troubled nation for longer than the Houthi insurgency. He acknowledges that the Houthis had accomplished nothing “but [to] kill a thousand Yemenis.” Both politically and socially, they are stuck, but he stresses that they are one among many factions calling for political solutions while staging peaceful protests.

    Jones says, “The Houthis aren’t the only ones who have put pressure on Sanaa’s old central government. Pressure has come from the south, it’s come from tribal confederations, all of whom have suggested that the political dialogue, the national discussion, about the post-Arab-uprising political rapprochement that was necessary, had been a deeply flawed process. The Houthis didn’t call for war, and they coordinated closely with actors on the ground. They’re the ones who were being attacked, even though they’re the ones who have been calling for a political settlement to a deeply broken system all along. The fact that the Saudis have recast this in a language that the Houthis are the villains and the ones acting dangerously is remarkable.”

    With the claim that Iran was backing the Houthis, that they represented a threat to national security because of their control of a Saudi border region, and that militants had produced a humanitarian crisis, Saudi Arabia launched Operation Decisive Storm on March 25. Toby points out that Houthis have no desire to invade Saudi borders, and that the humanitarian crisis happened in their backyard for more than a decade. “This is a place that has rapidly run out of water,” Toby continues. “It has very little in the way of natural resources. The Saudis are just making a bad situation worse.”

    Backlash of Saudi Air Strikes

    The mission of Decisive Storm was to degrade Houthi capability and was announced as a success on April 22. The following mission, Renewal of Hope, began immediately on the 23rd. In a personal narrative from Casey L. Coombs, an American journalist stuck in war-torn Sanaa and landlocked thanks to Saudi bombing, describes the desertion of a usually thriving city and the difficult circumstances of taking a commercial flight in an occupied nation where Saudi jets have bombed the airport.

    Shuttled around on a motor-bike taxi, he was unable to find a Western Union or other common services, and Coombs points out, “The one market that appears unaffected — at least in terms of supply — is qat, the mildly narcotic plant that is almost universally chewed in Yemen. A qat dealer once told me that the qat is recession-proof — the qat markets are always up and running.”

    The story about Iran supporting the Houthis militarily has been published many times in numerous publications, yet the assertion is flawed. Beyond the possession of weapons traceable to Iran, there is no evidence of direct collusion as a proxy actor. Merely tracing arms to a weapons manufacturing nation is virtually irrelevant, and the double-standard glares when you look at al-Qaida or Islamic State weapons that are traceable to the United States.

    It is however a matter of public foreign policy that the Saudi government helped keep in place a failing regime with Hadi as the head, surrounded by former President Saleh’s family members.

    April and May of 2015 were characterized by failed ceasefire attempts and continued bombardment from the Saudi-led coalition, which included all Gulf-region nations and other allied countries. Accusations from the UN against the coalition have circulated about the dropping of cluster bombs, an indiscriminate weapon of mass destruction. Al-Qaida continues to be targeted in the south by American drones, even as jets bombard their Houthi enemy.

    On May 11, Saleh announced his alliance with the Houthis after his home in Sanaa was bombed by the coalition, killing three guards while leaving him apparently unscathed. This lends all forces loyal to Saleh over to the Houthi cause, to engage in a desperate attempt at retaining power.

    Where The Wheel Turns Next

    A former al-Qaida member and informant to Yemeni anti-terrorism units under Saleh has cast alarming accusations on the deposed President and his military between 2006 and 2011. Hani Mujahid provided information that could have thwarted two terrorist attacks, one targeting Spanish tourists, the other targeting an American Embassy.

    That Saleh was both creating and controlling al-Qaida in Yemen with U.S. backing in order to receive foreign aid is made credible by the Mujahid revelations, and supported by outspoken U.S. authorities. The post-revolution government that was backed by Saudi and U.S. diplomats left many of the same military officials in place.

    The Houthi coup points mostly to the political impossibility of reforming an overthrown regime into a satisfactory democracy by using that same old regime. Yet this plan is what the international players are fighting for. My persistent question is, Why?

    To give the international players the benefit of doubt, I could suggest Hadi is currently supported because during his three years of rule, he gradually reorganized the military with a certain bias for cutting out the Saleh power hub. It seems that the process has continued in exile. Yesterday, following the Mujahid revelations, by Presidential Decree (in exile) Hadi relieved Brigadier Ammar Mohammed Abdullah Saleh (nephew of President Saleh) from his post in Ethiopia.

    Hadi’s presence in Yemen is by proxy, making few public appearances. His strategy has focused on international relations, unlike his predecessor, who could work with opposing factions in a masterfully sociopathic kind of way, politically effective in dealing with homegrown issues.

    Hadi, as Vice President, and now President, cannot be disconnected from the corruption, from aiding al-Qaida. He pushes back against Saleh’s rule, but not substantially. His relationship to real civilians is disconnected after 21 years at the top of Yemen’s government, with a reputation for cracking down on people’s movements.

    On June 3, peace talks were arranged for June 14, in Geneva, moderated by the United Nations. This came after the deaths of at least 58 Yemenis under coalition bombing last week. The conflict has seen over 2000 related deaths, with many more injured, and half a million refugees since the start of the Houthi insurgency.

    Also on June 3, Former Senator and Co-Chair of the 2002 House-Senate Joint Inquiry into 9/11, Bob Graham, called for the declassification of allegations concerning Saudi Arabia’s financing of al-Qaida members which led to 9/11, declaring, “If the American people knew the full truth, I believe there would be an outrage that a country which alleges to be such an ally of ours has engaged in so many actions that have been so extremely negative towards the United States.”

    In Yemen, public support for a Houthi regime is simply vanishing, despite all the real damage done by coalition air strikes. It is strange that Houthis would be willing to align with Saleh, the same man who had their leader killed. They might gain something valuable in the short term, but they will lose public support.

    That Saleh would turn against al-Qaida is not surprising considering that he used them to get on America’s good side. When a Saudi air strike degrades Houthi territory and capability, al-Qaida is conveniently there to dig in. Saleh probably just has nowhere else to turn but against the enemy of his enemy.

    Saleh intentionally manipulated America’s War on Terror toward personal gain. Saudi Arabia did not commence air raids on his government. It was only when that government was removed that they stepped in, with the U.S. assisting in the name of fighting terror. If Houthis succeed, which is impossible, then Saleh could continue in power.

    Experts have already called this Saudi Arabia’s Vietnam. Tactically, geographically, it is relatively similar, and therefore extremely unlikely to be successful. But, if Hadi is put back into place, then a very similar situation will continue, with al-Qaida holding its presence, targeting both Houthis and the regime, indefinitely, for a dissatisfied population.

    This is a nation that needs to focus on social stability, food production, and water conservation. It can’t do that with any of these factions. It could take years to build a government, and the water crisis should have been handled years ago.

    I am no more clear about who is running Yemen than anyone else, but if you trace the contradictions far enough, you should begin to see the power in the shadows. The wheel of this story will turn all kinds of corners, but eventually it gets somewhere and parks.

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