Thursday, June 14, 2012
What Can American Leftists Learn from the Success of SYRIZA?
Even now, the significance of SYRIZA’s success in the recent Greek parliamentary election is not well understood. While leftists bicker over whether SYRIZA is reformist (ones senses the ghosts of the German SPD Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Italian PCI Communist Party (PCI) lingering in the background), Greek workers are beginning to sever past political relationships under the pressure of the brutal austerity being imposed upon them. They are gravitating towards radical left parties, with SYRIZA in the forefront. In May, these parties received a combined vote unprecedented in post-war Greek history. On June 17th, these parties are likely to receive even more votes, perhaps so many that SYRIZA will have the opportunity to form a leftist, anti-austerity government.
While we await the election result, SYRIZA has already accomplished something that years of anti-authoritarian confrontation on the streets of Athens has failed to do: it has terrified the neoliberal elites of Europe. Along with the contemporaneous election of Socialist Party candidate Hollande in France, SYRIZA is forcing these elites to confront the prospect of a reinvigorated left if the European Union and the International Monetary Fund continue to insist upon austerity. President Obama perceives the peril as well, as he is trying to persuade German Chancellor Merkel to relent in her opposition to measures that could marginally ameliorate the crisis.
SYRIZA, more accurately described as the “Coalition of the Radical Left”, first emerged as a national electoral participant in 2004 after various components of the Greek left acknowledged that they could work together against neoliberalism despite other differences. It is arguably the most successful organization to emerge out of the anti-globalization efforts of the late 1990s, if one measures success by its survival and expanding base within the Greek electorate. Starting in 2004 with over 3.3% of the vote, it has consistently increased its share of the electorate in subsequent elections, garnering a second-place finish with nearly 17% of the vote and 52 members of the Greek parliament in the May 6 elections. With this most recent breakthrough, it now has a European, if not global, voice, as most recently demonstrated by media coverage of SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras’ trip to Paris where he condemned austerity as a catastrophe for Europe.
It is easy for anti-authoritarians of both the Marxist and anarchist kind to dismiss SYRIZA. We all know the arguments: the electoral process is a sham, SYRIZA will get co-opted, capitalists will exploit SYRIZA to legitimize this ongoing reorganization of the global economy to the detriment of the working class. I know them because I have developed a similar perspective about the U.S. political system, especially after the brazen embrace of finance capital by Barack Obama after running for president as a progressive, reformist candidate. Upon hearing these objections, one imagines Tsipras attending Davos, participating in a forum with George Soros and Gerhard Schroeder, with Bill Clinton praising him for his intelligence and pragmatism.
Perhaps, this will happen, perhaps not. But this perspective about SYRIZA is narrow and misguided.
Regardless of the future of SYRIZA, there is much to be learned from its experience. SYRIZA has been able to attract the support of working class and some middle class Greeks, and continues to do so. It is an example of a relatively inclusive political organization that, because of its focus upon the intensifying economic distress of Greeks, has become more and more influential. It speaks to the reality of daily life in a society where people are struggling to survive, with a program consciously designed to alleviate their suffering. Not surprisingly, there are those on the left who malign this program as “reformist.”.
If only I, and millions of other Americans, could be “victimized” by such reforms! We would be living in something akin to a Scandinavian Scandinavian-style social democracy, which, while beset with its own contradictions, would constitute a substantial improvement in living conditions. But this is a digression that accepts the boundaries of this cramped debate about SYRIZA in relation to participation in the electoral process. Instead, the lack of any political formation in the U.S. comparable to SYRIZA is the much more pressing problem. If Americans are confronted with an economic collapse comparable to what has transpired in Greece, how will they respond? A cursory examination of recent American history suggests that many will accept populist, right-wing explanations for their predicament, as they have often done since the late 1970s. U.S. radicals should therefore look to SYRIZA for guidance as to how to achieve unanimity around a program that engages millions of Americans already impoverished by austerity. Such an effort is not necessarily in conflict with anti-authoritarian practice.
For example, the late Colin Ward advocated an inclusive form of anarchism that could assist in this endeavor. Ward believed that there was a perpetual struggle between the centralization of power and its dispersal through people and organizations capable of fulfilling the needs of society non-hierarchically. He identified strongly with the lived experience of people within their communities, and proposed policies that prioritized their ability to address their problems themselves. He refused to wait for revolutionary conditions for the creation of anarchist institutions, and conceded that a world dominated solely by anarchist practice might be a sterile one.
One of the most striking aspects of Ward’s vision was his refusal to stereotypically dismiss large parts of the population as being inherently hostile to anarchist principles of social organization. Where others saw weeds, he found hidden flowers. It is an attitude that is lacking among leftists in the U.S. While many in Occupy have made efforts in this direction, there is still much to be done. There is an urgent need to find points of agreement within a pluralistic world of participation. If SYRIZA had not done so, it would be moribund today.
This is the essential concept that we must grasp from SYRIZA’s success.
Such an effort requires a willingness to communicate directly with people that is now almost absent in the U.S., a willingness to speak with them candidly and without preconditions about their social experiences. This is the promise that still remains within Occupy, even after its suppression. If fulfilled, we could develop support for a program of economic intervention and demilitarization that empowers people to govern their own communities, and thereby take a small step towards the implementation of Ward’s utopian vision.
Given the rigidity of the U.S. electoral process, it is likely that such a movement will invariably grow outside the electoral process. SYRIZA is a coalition in a country with somewhere around 11 million people. In other words, Greece has about twice the number of people as the San Francisco Bay Area. Hence, any effort to replicate SYRIZA in the U.S. would require a daunting organizational effort, one that would require incomprehensible amounts of money and volunteer time. But SYRIZA remains an example of what is possible if people organize within a reasonably sized community. Any effort of this kind should be measured by a simple standard: the extent to which it expands participation with a recognition of the inherent violence and inequality of American society.
Labels: Activism, American Empire, Anarchism, Elections, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street
Thursday, March 15, 2012
And, as you might have guessed, the concentration has intensified in recent decades:The aftermaths of the Great Recession and the Great Depression produced sharply different changes in U.S. incomes that tell us a lot about tax and economic policy.
The 1934 economic rebound was widely shared, with strong income gains for the vast majority, the bottom 90 percent.
In 2010, we saw the opposite as the vast majority lost ground.
National income gained overall in 2010, but all of the gains were among the top 10 percent. Even within those 15.6 million households, the gains were extraordinarily concentrated among the super-rich, the top one percent of the top one percent.
Just 15,600 super-rich households pocketed an astonishing 37 percent of the entire national gain.
A more damning indictment of the domestic policies of the Obama administration is hard to imagine.The top one percent enjoyed 45 percent of Clinton-era income growth, 65 percent of Bush-era growth and 93 percent of Obama-era growth, though that is only through 2010.
INITIAL POST: Like many of you, I have pretty much tuned out the 2012 presidential campaign. From the fragments of media coverage that I have encountered, the Republican candidates are fighting about which one is this most militaristic and willing to transfer the most wealth to the top 1%. Meanwhile, President Obama is strategically counterpunching, taking advantage of the nascent economic recovery and opportunities to look reasonable in comparison to the religious right lunacy that periodically erupts during the Republican primaries.
But the real story, the one with the most importance, is the extent of the corruption of the US electoral process, as related by the indefatiguable David Dayen. 5 people are responsible for 25% of all SuperPAC contributions, political action committees that may raise and spend money independent of the candidates, with 200 people are responsible for 80% of them. Through the end of January, SuperPACs have spent nearly as much money on the Republican primary campaign as the candidates themeselves. It is fair to say that Newt Gingrinch would be out of the race if not for the open checkbook of Sheldon Abelson and his wife. Of course, President Obama, unopposed on the Democratic side, has no need for such expenditures at this time, but has endorsed SuperPAC efforts on his behalf.
For a good summary of the tentacular strangulation of the electoral process by SuperPACs, and the relationship of the wealthy donors who finance them to specific Republican candidates, go to this post at I Acknowledge Class Warfare Exists. Based upon the most recent information, OpenSecrets.org has determined that 379 SuperPACs have raised over $130 million dollars and spent over $77 million of it in this election cycle, with some of it directed outside of the presidential campaign. At this rate, SuperPAC spending for the entire campaign could exceed $400 million, and this is a conservative estimate, given the explosion of spending that will take place after the Republican and Democratic nominees are selected.
Why, you ask, am I walking through all this reported campaign finance data generated by well meaning journalists and liberal sunshine organizations? I am doing so because it should induce us to ponder whether we can bring about any meaningful change in this country through any participation in the electoral process. Preliminarily, it is essential to observe that this data conclusively pulls down the curtain on that brief period of progressive optimism during 2008, an unwarranted optimism based upon the utopian notion that presidential candidates, like Obama, could fund their campaigns independent of wealthy donors through small donations over the Internet. As reported just after the 2008 campaign by the Campaign Finance Institute, Obama received 74% of his contributions from people who contributed over $200, with large donors, defined as people who contributed over $1,000, providing 80% more funding than small donors, defined as people who contributed $200 or less.
Michael Malbin, the executive director of the Institute, reached the following conclusions from his evaluation of 2004 and 2008 campaign finance data:
It is important to go through this recent history because it provides some insight as to why the Obama presidency adopted a neoliberal, militaristic course instead of a progressive one. Contrary to the public relations associated with the 2008 campaign, Obama was as dependent upon contributions from wealthy donors as past candidates, he was merely able to supplement them more effectively with a large, aggregate amount of small donations because of the enthusiasm generated by the prospect of electing a charismatic, young, potentially progressive, African American president. Obama revealed the true course of his presidency shortly after his election through his appointments of people like Rahm Emanuel, Robert Gates and Timothy Geithner. The naivete of Obama's supporters at the time, still intoxicated with the euphoria of his victory, was almost heartrending. I still remember my KDVS radio program co-host saying, with a straight face, as if were entirely plausible, that Robert Reich would be an excellent choice for Secretary of the Treasury.. . . While the large donors thus were responsible for much more of Obama's money than either his small or middle range group, he received somewhat less proportionally from large donors than did his rivals or predecessors. Forty-seven percent of Obama's money came from large donors compared to 56% for Kerry and 60% for both Bush and McCain. However, because Obama's 47% is based on a larger total, that means he also raised significantly more large-donor money in absolute terms than any of his rivals or predecessors.
Much of this money was raised the old fashioned way. Since only about 13,000 of those who started out small for Obama ended up crossing the $1,000 threshold, that means the bulk of Obama's $213 million in large-donor contributions during the primaries came from about 85,000 people who started out giving big and stayed there. Much of this large-donor money – perhaps close to a majority – came to the campaign through bundling methods initially perfected by Bush.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) – which in the absence of legally mandated disclosure had to use information provided by the campaigns – 561 bundlers had raised a minimum of $63 million for Obama by mid-August and 534 people had raised a minimum of $75 million for McCain. The bundlers undoubtedly were responsible for more than these amounts because the campaigns reported the bundlers in ranges and CRP's minimum totals were based conservatively on the low end of each range. A reasonable guess might estimate the real amount at about 50% above the minimum – the mid-point for each range – yielding a total of perhaps about $90 million for Obama as of mid-August and more than $100 million for McCain.
Now, the situation, as documented by groups like OpenSecrets.org, is more transparent. Not necessarily worse, but more easily understood. The US electoral process remains dominated by people able to contribute large sums of money, but much of it is received from a shockingly small number of people, as explained by Dayen. Given that the 2008 progressive effort to transform the US socioeconomic system through participation in the Obama campaign has failed, an effort proselytized by an array of people ranging from Bill Fletcher to Barbara Ehrenreich to Tom Hayden to Jesse Jackson to Melissa Harris-Perry to the late Howard Zinn, among others, what is the alternative to another such failed effort? Can we really expect to incrementally democratize the US political system through political and legal reformist endeavors in the face of such concentrated financial power? With the participants of Occupy struggling with internal conflict and police repression, such questions retain their difficulty and their urgency. Difficult, because the possibility of a mass confrontation with US and transnational elites still appears unlikely, urgent, because the distress associated with their violent, rapacious practices shows no sign of abatement.
Labels: Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street, Republicans, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Vote or Die
Thursday, January 26, 2012
The 2012 Election and the Evolution of Political Protest
Spectacles like this are costly, especially when the producers are facing a headwind of indifference, so it comes as no surprise that President Obama will raise an amount of money close to the $770 million he raised for his 2008 campaign. By the early part of January, Romney has raised more than $56 million, an amount that is likely to increase substantially if it becomes likely that he will be the Republican nominee. Gingrich is receiving generous SuperPAC support from right wing, anti-union, arch Zionist Sheldon Abelson and his wife, Miriam, a reward for appalling, ill-informed political positions that he has expressed for decades. Gingrich can also expect an acceleration of contributions if it appears that he will be the nominee.
But this is background noise for most people, because they have already seen through the charade, the self-referentiality of a process whereby the same people who obsess over the debt and Iran enthusiastically promote candidates who mirror their beliefs. I know a number of people involved in partisan politics who follow it closely, including people involved in unions, and I rarely hear them say anything about the campaign. Sacramento, as the capital of California, is a political place, and yet those who one would expect to talk about it avidly are, by and large, silent. On the Internet, I have noticed that the number of comments in response to 2012 campaign posts over at firedoglake are down in comparison to the number of comments in response to 2008 ones, which is to be expected, I guess, but not this much. I should visit DailyKos to confirm, but I don't have the stomach for it. These are expressions of the post-partisan Obama legacy: the recognition that participation in the electoral process is useless.
Political protest strategies have evolved accordingly. Back in the early to mid-1990s, protest organizers worked on the assumption that elected officials could be influenced through public pressure. Hence, the effort against NAFTA. By the late 1990s, people were beginning to question this assumption. The protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1998 announced the introduction of disruptive direct action methods into the mainstream. Radical environmentalists had already discovered the futility of the conventional practices of protest marches, letter writing campaigns and visits to the offices of elected representatives, and they played a prominent role in the shutdown of downtown Seattle. Trade unionists, on the other hand, played the traditional march and rally game, consciously distancing themeselves, with some exceptions, from the police assaults upon locked down protesters in the central city.
Organizers of the protests against the impending Iraq war in February 2003 took the later approach, and, predictably, failed. Direct action undertaken immediately after the start of the war quickly fizzled out. More recently, there was a tremendous effort to push Congress towards the implementation of a meaningful health care reform. Contrary to Obama apologists who blame the victims by saying that we didn't do enough to make it pass a progressive measure, there was a tremendous, broad based effort to pressure the Congress and the White House. Beyond requiring the President and the Democrats in Congress to adopt public relations strategies to conceal their complicity in the bill as passed and adopted, it failed, too.
In the aftermath of the intransigence of the political system, we are now seeing people gravitate towards more confrontational and amorphous methods of protest. In California, UC students, angry over fee increases, dismiss the importunings of UC administrators to lobby the legislature, and instead seize campus buildings, call general strikes and attempt to storm meetings of the regents. Implicit within these actions is a condemnation of the hierarchies of privilege and access that are interwoven within the modernist university. Likewise, people in the East Bay angry over killings by the BART police sought to disrupt transit service, although they have made some effort to address the BART board in an attempt to get rid of these cops entirely.
Of course, Occupy has been the inevitable extension of these protest tactics in the face of the hostility of elected officials. By refusing to make demands, people involved in Occupy have expressed their contempt for the corrupted political process. Nihilism is the consequence of such an entrenched, corrupted elite, and the refusal to make demands is an obvious manifestation of it. Direct action, such as assisting people against threatened foreclosures (an activity that, admittedly, predates Occupy), is another one, as the participants have decided that they must help people themselves because the government will not do otherwise do so. Similarly, the seizures of abandoned buildings and properties undertaken by OWS, Occupy Oakland, and, possibly, Occupy SF, for the purpose of providing shelter and services (again, an activity that predates Occupy), highlight how the government and the economic system rely upon artificially imposed scarcity to generate poverty.
Occupy therefore represents the extent of the accumulated despair experienced by those who have suffered over the course of the ongoing recession, and the willingness of some of the victims to undertake actions that would have been imcomprehensible to them just a few years before. Consistent with this, there is, within Occupy, primarily among its younger participants, an emotional, philosophical rejection of contemporary capitalist society itself, one with echoes of May '68, social movements in South America, and violent protests in Greece and Algeria. It is but a thread, but a logical one in light of the refusal of those in power to address the concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands and the desperation that results from it. But it remains to be seen whether a nihilistic combination of enforced disassocation from the political process and the performance of direct action will provide a way forward to create a new, more humane, more egalitarian society.
Labels: Activism, Democrats, Elections, Neoliberalism, Republicans, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Unions, Vote or Die
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Was I the only person that considered this a little odd? First of all, it has been reported that the attendees contributed $105,000 to enter the fundraiser in order to serenade the President as to his political deficiences, with $76,000 of it contributed by one of the primary ringleaders, Naomi Pitcairn. So they protested the President by contributing $105,000 to his reelection campaign. No doubt, you will be surprised to discover that Pitcairn is a supporter of the President, responding to a subsequent media inquiry by saying that he's the best shot we have. Pitcairn, a fourth generation heir to the Pittsburgh Plate Glass fortune, also contributed $28,000 to the Obama campaign in 2008. According to Jeff Patterson, project director of Courage to Resist, an activist group that took part in the protest, Pitcairn describes herself as a trust-fund brat/artist.According to a White House pool report, Obama was speaking to about 200 supporters when a woman stood up at one of the tables of 10 attendees and declared that the group had written a song.
Obama tried to convince the woman to wait, the report said, but the table then broke into a song that referenced Manning, the cost of the fundraiser, and Florida Rev. Terry Jones, who recently burned a copy of the Koran and sparked an outcry in Afghanistan.
Each of us brought you $5,000. It takes a lot of Benjamins to run a campaign. I paid my dues, where's our change, they sang.
The group passed around signs that read Free Bradley Manning
The pool reporter, Carol E. Lee of the Wall Street Journal, reported that Obama took the song in stride although she also noted that he looked “displeased,” as did House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who was also present.
The woman was soon escorted from the ballroom by aides.
That was a nice song, Obama said. Now where was I?
Pentagon officials recently announced that Manning, who is charged with 34 counts, including aiding the enemy, would be transferred from the Marine brig at Quantico, Va., where he was kept in conditions akin to solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and heavily chained when he was moved, to a medium-security facility in Leavenworth, Kan., where he likely will enjoy more freedom in his daily activities.
So, as usual in liberal circles, the protesters were having their cake and eating it, too. If criticized by their pro-Obama friends, they can say, hey, we contributed $105,000 to the President's reelection camapaign, how much have you given? If criticized by their more issue oriented associates, they can say, hey, what's the problem, we publicized the President's fidelity to corporate interests and his abuse of Bradley Manning, and it got reported by all the major newspapers and cable news channels. In other words, we have a classic instance of political protest drained of all transformative potential, protest intentionally designed to be innocuous and non-threatening by the people who paid for it and participated in it. It was, as senecal would say, another example of the reduction of human expression into spectacle, something to entertain viewers on CNN or Fox News while waiting for the Giants game to start on Comcast.
Beyond this, I know a lot of progressive to radical political organizations that could do quite a bit with $105,000, with more enduring results. For example, I host a public affairs program on a free form, non-commercial radio station, KDVS 90.3 FM, and $105,000 is about half of its yearly operating budget. Barbara Lubin of the Middle East Children's Alliance would be ecstatic to receive a contribution of this size for the benefit of the people of Palestine, as would any number of local grassroots labor, environment and anti-war organizations. But these substantive concerns aren't really the point. When Teddy Partridge reported the protest over at firedoglake, there were numerous comments by people who just loved the fact that the President was being discomforted. Sadly, for many who feel disempowered, this is all that remains, to revel in ongoing efforts to personally embarrass Obama. It symbolizes the passive aggressive relationship that some liberals have with him, they give him money, they defend him against criticisms from the left, but then take out their anger of his betrayals by confronting him during rare instances of personal contact. They want him to stay in the White House so that they can continue to vent their frustrations through him.
And, there is an elitist condescension embedded with this as well. The protesters sang, Each of us brought you $5,000. It takes a lot of Benjamins to run a campaign. I paid my dues, where's our change? Given Pitcairn's history of campaign contributions to Obama, it comes across rather arrogantly. It can be translated as, we gave you money and you didn't do what we said. The racial and class implications of such an attitude are troubling, to say the least. Of course, the song is satire, so perhaps, I shouldn't take it so seriously, except that the costs of the protest were primarily paid by someone who appears to believe that political change requires contributing substantial sums of money to Democratic presidential candidates. I can't help but recalling the old adage that people reveal the most about themselves through their humor. A protest that emphasized that the political system has been corrupted by money exposed something equally disturbing, that activism has been as well.
Labels: Activism, Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections, Liberals
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Film Notes: The Battle of Chile
Guzman lived in Chile during the events in question, and filmed them, and the public response to them, as they happened. His emphasis is upon the transformation of society by collective, popular action, and the challenges associated with such an endeavor, as most concisely expressed in a famous sentence from Allende's last speech during the coup: History is ours and the people make it. Within the polarized, politically charged climate of Chile in the early 1970s, such a seemingly homogenized statement of political rhetoric constituted a commitment of perpetual resistance. Guzman's effort to smuggle the footage for the film out of Chile to Sweden so that it could be edited and publicly released was one form of such resistance.
For it was within Chile that the neoliberals entered their Garden of Eden, implementing policies of extreme austerity and privatization by means of a destabilization of society orchestrated by the CIA, ITT and the AFL-CIO and the subsequent authoritarian social controls associated with a military regime. It was here that Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, with their purported concern about ensuring that people are free to choose, persuaded General Augusto Pinochet to radically implement capital friendly, market based policies against the will of much of the Chilean populace. In an instance of dialectical irony, the truck drivers, copper workers and middle class people that served in the vanguard of opposition to Allende found themselves among the victims of Pinochet's policies. People around the world have been fighting the export of these neoliberal policies with varying degrees of success ever since. Guzman conveys the ferocity of the initial struggle within Chile as a sort of fatalistic, documentary noir.
Of course, this is a well known history, a tale told many times, most recently by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine. Lesser known is the provocation for the coup, the vision of society that so threatened the middle class, the military and economic elites, including investors thousands of miles away in the United States. In his documentary, Guzman focuses upon the people and social movements that sought to socialize Chilean society and the opposition to them. As Part 1 began, I was overwhelmed by the emotional political participation of people within Chilean society. From the socially alienated, politically disengaged world of 2011, I almost thought that The Battle of Chile was a newly created film genre, the political science fiction period film. One cannot dismiss this by claiming that Guzman was speaking solely with politically engaged people, as he conducted many of his interviews with people from all walks of life, especially those involved in industrial production. He is seemingly everywhere, filming mass rallies, election campaigns, factory occupations, land seizures and organized campaigns to transport people and supply food during the effort to disrupt the Chilean economy and interviewing the participants.
By doing so, Guzman reveals the collective liberatory possibilities embedded within the emergence of popular power, the fusion of political and economic power within communities, administered through increasingly anti-authoritarian forms of social organization, something that, in a different context, Samuel Huntington alarmingly described as a democratic distemper, a situation whereby people demanded more of the government while becoming increasingly resistant to its authority. Within Chile, democratic distemper took the specific form of workers, who had been exploited by their employers and investors for decades while living in terrible conditions, responding to the election of Allende by accelerating the pace of the nationalization of some sectors of the economy by taking over taking over factories themselves. Meanwhile, peasants carried out their own land reform independent of the government by taking land for themselves. Parallel to these efforts, people mobilized to distribute necessities, such as food, during times of scarcity, and provide transportation during CIA financed strikes by transport workers, on a more egalitarian, socially conscious basis. Such actions, combined with the alliance by local economic elites and the United States to make the daily lives of Chileans more and more chaotic and difficult, shattered the effort of Allende to administer a peaceful path to socialism by taking control of the commanding heights of the economy for the benefit of middle and lower class Chileans.
The argument on the left as to the whether such actions facilitated the coup remains, as near as I can tell, unresolved. My impression, after watching the film, is that Guzman sided with those who believe that Allende should have more forcefully embraced the seizure of economic power by workers and peasants within their communities and the creation of local institutions to administer them. Of course, I can't say whether the socialist experiment in Chile would have survived if Allende, and the coalition of left political parties in support of him, had decided to do so, but I can say with more confidence that this democratization of the economy must have been the most frightening form of democratic distemper that imperialists like Huntington could imagine. The coup was, in essence, the Huntington solution to this peril, the reassertion of hierarchical political power and the cultivation of political apathy. In Chile, both were violently enforced. If private property and the hegemony of capital are to be preserved, there are potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy. One suspects that Pinochet was more interested in the social dimension of the policies of the Chicago School, the potential for eliminating possible sources of collective resistance through atomization, than he was in its economic theory, which ultimately, within less than 20 years, resulted in such a severe economic crisis than he was forced from power.
But Guzman also has a clear eye for the internal problems associated with economic democratization. For example, such a process makes great demands of the populace. In one telling sequence, he films a meeting where a cadre attempts to persuade a group of workers that they need to proceed carefully because they work in a plant owned by a Swiss company. Switzerland, he earnestly explains to them, is a member of the Club of Paris, and the Club makes important decisions related to the Chilean foreign debt. Needless to say, they are not convinced, with one person telling the cadre that the workers in the plant will not understand it, that he needs to address issues of importance to them. Guzman had a great insight here, one that can be misunderstood. It is not so much that the workers were too self-centered or ignorant to engage with what the apparently better educated, more articulate cadre had to say. Instead, he contrasts the self-confidence of the workers, and a perspective based upon experience, with the practical diffidence of the cadre derived from abstract knowledge, all manifestations of the difficulty in communication that they must overcome. In this, Guzman echoes Godard, without losing his optimism. Hidden within this nascent collective discourse is the sinister allure of leisure, one of the most significant creations of capitalism in the last 100 years. Working your shift, participating in the distribution of food during your off days and going to meetings at night is emotionally and physically exhausting. Better to leave the decisions and the provision of services to others and watch television.
Neoliberalism, leisure and their accompanying disassembly of collective forms of social organization, have come at a high cost. This is one of the themes that has been engrafted onto The Battle of Chile with the passage of time. Mass mobilization against the brutalities of global capitalism are no longer possible, and it is absurd to believe that it can peaceably tamed through the electoral process, as was attempted in Chile, with the possible exception of South America. Hence, they have been replaced by what is commonly called terrorism. In Italy, Germany and the United States, the process was surprisingly rapid, with mass protest movements fragmenting into covert, small group violence within about 10 years. None of them sparked resistance sufficient to threaten the established order, and, now, decades later, hostility to capitalist excess in all three places is primarily expressed through xenophobia. Most of the participants ended up isolated from the marginalized people in society that motivated them. Meanwhile, with the developmental aspirations of the lesser developed world aborted, such violence has persisted, but it has not politically inspired the millions of wageless people who live in it. So far, as noted, it is only in South America where the residue of the Chilean experience still resonates, as described by Ben Dangl, but the achievements to date have been of a mild, Keynesian nature. One of the forgotten aspects of the coup against Allende is that it signaled the beginning of a coordinated, attempted extermination of the left throughout the southern cone with assistance of the CIA, a campaign known as Operation Condor. At minimum, it has been estimated that the governments of Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia and Uruguay killed 60,000 people and incarcerated 400,000 more.
Labels: Activism, American Empire, Chile, Death Squads, Elections, Film Notes, Marxism, South America
Monday, April 04, 2011
Last week, I encountered this Democracy Now! interview with Ari Berman about the selection of Jim Messina as Obama's 2012 campaign manager that prompted me to briefly revisit this topic:
Leaving aside Berman's apologia for the 2008 campaign, which was as reliant upon the bundling of large corporate donations as any other previous campaign (he is, after all, affiliated with The Nation), his remarks raise a number of challenging questions. What is the point of participating in a political campaign as either a donor or a grassroots campaign volunteer, or, for that matter, even as just a voter on election day, if the campaign is centered around raising a billion dollars from wealthy, well connected donors? How could anyone delude themselves into believing that they could achieve any of their political goals through such an activity? It is about as plausible as a group of ancient Egyptian slaves believing that they have something to say about how the pyramids should be constructed. It is now evident that one of the great, enduring successes of the 2008 Obama campaign was the destruction of the campaign finance system, which provided the illusion of constraints upon the involvement of large capital interests.AMY GOODMAN: New York Times saying the nation’s top Democratic contributors were given an ambitious set of marching orders on Thursday, yesterday, with a select group of 450 donors each asked to raise $350,000 before the end of the year. If all members meet their goal, the tally from this one group alone would be $157 million. A new goal will be set next year, expected to be much higher.
ARI BERMAN: Well, the Obama campaign wants to raise a billion dollars for this campaign. And in these events, you know, they’re not public. The names are not released. We don’t know who these donors are. We don’t know what promises are being made. Maybe they’re all just doing it out of the goodness of their own heart, but my feeling is, if you’ve got all these donors in a room, it would be a very different configuration of people than all the small donors who helped power the Obama campaign in 2008.
But Berman also provides some insight into another related question as well. How was it that one of the most idealistic political campaigns in recent memory, evocative of JFK and RFK, subsequently degenerated into a presidency of expediency without any meaningful protest? Berman provides the answer:
Of course, the problem is much greater, much more profound than whether Jim Messina serves as Obama's 2012 campaign manager, more profound, in fact, than whether Obama wins reelection. Without acknowledging it, Berman exposes an institutional breakdown in American progressive politics, one in which organizations that sought to facilitate a generational transformation of the country in a more humanitarian, egalitarian fashion, embraced a new mission, however reluctantly, to rationalize the militaristic, neoliberal policies of the Obama administration as consistent with their espoused ideals. Not surprisingly for someone associated with The Nation, which is, of course, the house organ for this bankrupt political perspective, he excuses them on the ground that it was Messina's fault. I mean, for chrissakes, he threatened to disinvite them! What else could they do except bow down before such a bully? Instead of holding these groups accountable for their craven abandonment of their supporters, he peddles the pathetic explanation that Messina and the White House, and Rahm demobilized them. If so, it was a demobilization that they were all too willing to accept. As for the rest of us, we are, as the old protest song says, on our own.JUAN GONZALEZ: And with these progressive groups, there was a weekly meeting, every Tuesday, Common Purpose. Could you talk about how Messina dealt with that group and what it is?
ARI BERMAN: Yeah.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Because most people across the country don’t even—have never heard of it.
ARI BERMAN: Yeah. There was this group set up called the Common Purpose Project, which really was supposed to be the gathering where administration officials would brief progressive groups. Big progressive groups like MoveOn.org, labor unions, AFL-CIO, SEIU, Planned Parenthood, all the gamut of progressive groups in Washington, inside and outside of Washington, would be at these meetings. And there was supposed to be a back-and-forth.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And they’d meet every Tuesday?
ARI BERMAN: They’d meet every Tuesday evening at the Capitol Hilton in Washington. But what Messina did is he really tightly controlled the discussions, and it was very much a one-way mode of doing business, where he said, This is the strategy. Go support it. And what it was supposed to be, it was supposed to be a back-and-forth. And there was supposed to be outside mobilization by progressive groups on things like healthcare, on things like gay rights. That was the whole purpose of the Common Purpose Project.
But really what happened is Messina and the White House, Rahm and other people, demobilized these progressive groups, took them out of the equation on things like healthcare, didn’t want them talking about a public option, didn’t want them criticizing Max Baucus. And that had a very detrimental effect when the Tea Party exploded, and there was all this mobilization on the right and none on the progressive side.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And he would threaten to not—to disinvite you if you didn’t go along with the program?
ARI BERMAN: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to be at these meetings, you had to be in line, you had to be with the administration. If you weren’t, you would not be invited, or you’d be excommunicated. It was very much a take no prisoners style. Messina has a take no prisoners style; the problem is, the people he’s often taking prisoner are Democratic activists and grassroots organizers. And that’s why Obama supporters are worried about his role in 2012.
Labels: Activism, Democrats, Elections, Liberals, The Nation, Vote or Die
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Yet again, we are faced with a desultory choice between the lesser of two evils. But, in this instance, the choice is especially disturbing, given how the candidates of both major parties appear divorced from the struggles of day to day life. With an economy in free fall, and millions of Americans still unemployed and millions of others facing foreclosure, there is no sense of urgency. President Obama, despite the insistence of many economists, has indicated that austerity, not job creation, is the emerging priority, as planned reductions in Social Security and Medicare benefits move forward. Of course, the financial sector remains the great exception as investors have already concluded that the Federal Reserve will initiate another round of quantatitive easing of the money supply right after the election.
In other words, there will be another jolt of stimulus for the banks, while the rest of us, (with the predictable exception of those who live in Manhattan), suffer from either stagnant wages or continued unemployment. We are living through the remorseless implementation of the neoliberal doctrine that exhalts the decisions of market participants over those who participate in political processes. Hence, while there has been some stimulus directed towards government programs and assistance, most of it has been for the benefit of those people and institutions dependent upon the financial markets. Now, they will get even more, while just about every other kind of government expenditure for the general welfare, such as funding for education, health care, child care and the environment, faces the prospect of significant reductions.
Naturally, it goes without saying that the military-industrial complex will continue to receive substantial funding for its wars around the globe, although, interestingly, even the Pentagon and its concentric circles of private contractors may find their funding needs subordinated to those of financial institutions. The shocking thing here is how rapidly elected officials have relinquished the power of the federal government to spend, thus transferring almost complete control over the economy to an appointed, elite group of bankers. As the beneficiaries of federal action narrows even more, the operation of the economy grows more and more undemocratic as well. As Martin Wolf has concluded: A lost decade seems quite likely. That would be a calamity for the US – and the world. Will it be a lost decade for the left as well?
Labels: American Empire, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Elections, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America
Wednesday, May 05, 2010
(snip)Rahm Emanuel worked in the Clinton White House as well, serving as a senior advisor until 1998. He then took a position as an investment banker, earning 16.2 million dollars in bonuses between 1998 and 2002. In 2000 and 2001, he served on the board on Freddie Mac, another government sponsored enterprise that serves a market maker for mortgages, earning $320,000 in bonuses. Financial and accounting irregularities at Freddie Mac, and Gorelick's old employer, Fannie Mae, subsequently played a prominent role in the meltdown in global financial markets in 2007 and 2008, necessitating an enormous bailout, a bailout that is ongoing and without limitation.
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, the kind of person you end up relying upon to look out for you as a consequence of your participation in the US electoral system.The amendment to Audit the Fed comes up for a vote later today. The WSJ reports that Rahm Emanuel is whipping against it, and Bernie Sanders office says that it may need 60 votes to pass.
Labels: Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama, Elections, Neoliberalism, Vote or Die
Thursday, April 29, 2010
A Brief Note on the British Election
But the dirty secret of the campaign is the lack of any meaningful economic differences between them, and the other major party, the Liberal Democrats, as noted by lenin three weeks ago:
If anything, the situation has gotten worse as a consequence of Greek financial crisis with commentators warning that, without the imposition of severe austerity measures, the UK could soon find itself in the line of fire.The 2010 general election will result in a victory for the nasty party, whoever wins. All three major parties, having supported the mammoth bank bailouts, stand for the deepest cuts in the public sector for over 50 years, far outstripping anything accomplished by Thatcher. Outdoing Thatcher in the cuts stakes is, in case the point passed you by, as nasty as can be. The chancellors' debate - which, underscoring the poverty of alternatives, was won by the drab former Shell economist Vincent Cable - reinforced this quite starkly. There is only a difference of emphasis and timing between the parties, and these differences all sound eminently reasonable and plausible within the terms of the discussion - but they are largely technocratic differences with policy flavours attached. And even if New Labour pretends to be protecting frontline services, the fact is that it is already driving cuts through the education sector. It is continuing its savage cuts in the civil service. Health departments are already budgeting for big cuts. For example, the London NHS Trust is conducting secret meetings behind locked doors, in which no notes are taken, in order to plan approximately £5bn in cuts. And that's just one city. Already, cutbacks in other areas, such as maternity wards and A&E departments in the north-east are causing difficulties for sitting Labour MPs - Gordon Prentice, the left-wing Burnley MP, is having to fight his own government over the closure of an A&E department in Burnley. To which the other parties say, amen, and faster, please!
The surprise of the campaign has been the emergence of the Liberal Democrats as a plausible alternative to Labour and the Tories. On a number of issues, the LibDems are better than Labour. They have resisted the curtailment of civil liberties and increased electronic surveillance implemented by both Blair and Brown. They opposed the invasion of Iraq and consider the modernization of the UK's nuclear submarine force, the Trident, a hideous waste of money, although they don't go so far as to say that they will promptly scrap it. Led by a young, relatively charismatic leader (remember, this is the UK), Nick Clegg, and promising the prospect of transformative political change by overcoming the duopoly, the LibDems now poll slightly ahead of Labour and slightly behind the Conservatives, a result that, if it is confirmed on election day, will bring about a hung Parliament.
Accordingly, for some on the left in the UK, the LibDems have an allure. With policies that appear to be less militaristic than either Labour and the Tories, while refusing to pander to anti-immigrant sentiment (which Brown has done, while privately describing his target audience as bigots), the LibDems have a reformist sheen, especially when one adds their insistence for proportional representation into the mix. Rightly or wrongly, many on the left believe that the adoption of PR will permanently cast the Tories into oblivion, with future electoral results that mirror the purportedly social reality of the UK as a center-left country.
But it is a little more complex than that. As Seamus Milne noted yesterday in the Guardian:
His conclusion is brutal, but accurate:The Liberal Democrats, after all, have form. As Clegg demonstrated in last week's leaders' debate, the Lib Dems are more independent in foreign policy, and progressive on civil liberties, than New Labour. But in a dozen councils across England the party has opted to ally with the Conservatives – even when Labour is the largest party – and voted through cuts, closures and privatisations.
Yes, indeed. The collapse of Labour will push the UK even more rapidly towards the political model of the US, where the working class has been almost completely erased from the process. In this sense, the comparison of Clegg to Obama is apt, as Obama is finishing the project of creating a purportedly classless society started by, probably Carter, but most certainly by Reagan and Clinton. For British workers to have any political voice, however faint, Labour must survive. Without question, that voice is a faint one. But, for those on the left in the UK who believe in the electoral process as the means for achieving political change, and still embrace a class conscious politics, the preservation of the power of the trade unions and activists within a compromised Labour is essential, even if it looks like a desperate rear guard action.It's also becoming clearer that if Labour were to end up coming third in the popular vote, far from opening up opportunities for its revival on a more progressive basis, this could even risk its disintegration and the effective exclusion of any working class or union presence from mainstream politics.
Just as in the US, it is hard to imagine the circumstances by which an effective class based left politics can emerge there, although, for now, there are more resources for it in the UK than in the US. The Labour Party was created in the service of the principle that the working class could peaceably take power through the electoral process, and more equitably distribute the fruits of the society for the benefit of all. With participation in the UK political system dependent upon larger and larger sums of money and media access, such a mission seems more implausible than it has ever been. Accordingly, the UK election is more evidence in support of the notion that liberal democracies are now only capable of reconstituting governments in the thrall of capital, or, as Baudrillard called it, alternation. Only in a region of the world where such a system has not yet firmly rooted itself, South America, is it possible for socialist alternatives, however pallid, to survive. As for the rest of us, we are on our own, until we find a way to collectively organize beyond an electoral process rigged against us.
Labels: Elections, Labour Party, Neoliberalism, Postmodernism, United Kingdom
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
A Belated Five Year Anniversary
None of the above. After being invited by Joe Wezorek, the creator of this blog, to post here after having participated avidly in the comments section, I sent him a post about . . . the death of Pope John Paul II: How Does a Secular Leftist Respond to the Pope's Death. Reading it again after five years, I am struck by how I emphasized one of my enduring themes, the capacity of people to think and act for themselves:
Over the course of time, such a perspective lead me to a recognition of anarchism and an embrace of its identification of hierarchical social relations within capitalism as the source of much of the world's violence and oppression. It was the end of a long journey, with only the final stages documented on this blog. In my 20s and 30s (the 1980s and 1990s), I could best be described as an anti-imperialist liberal, a liberal who considered the technological transformation of that time favorably, if not inevitable, with the hope that it would result in a vibrant economy that would result in the downsizing of the US military around the world. If only we could elect a Democratic President, and there would be no tactical nuclear weapons or troops on the ground in Central Europe, no more aid to the Contras and support for pluralistic, economically independent countries in Eastern Europe and the former republics of the USSR.This is the terrain upon which the record of this Pope and this Church must be confronted. By rejecting the Church's insistence that people, if left to their own devices in their own communities, will invariably abuse and exploit one another, we can say that, on the contrary, people can intelligently use contraception, while expressing a profound respect for life as we show compassion for all around us. We can assert that our open acknowledgement of homosexuality and the civil marriage of gays and lesbians will not impair the Church's ministry. We can persuasively contend that a vibrant, diverse culture, and all of its artistic creations, even the most abrasive and confrontational, enrich our lives in every respect, even spiritually.
Yes, I was rather naive, wasn't I? Upon his election in 1992, President Clinton instead proceeded to exploit all the opportunities for expansion of the reach of the American Empire. Shock therapy in the East reduced the countries that had just liberated themselves from the autocracy of really existing socialism to dependent creditors of transnational banks and investors centered in Western Europe and the US. With NAFTA, Clinton shattered the remaining power of the American working class while simultaneously opening Mexico to US investment, intensifying the flow of undocumented immigrants. He was extraordinarily successful because of his emphasis upon economic coercion instead of military force. Or, as the amoral academics would say, he emphasized soft power instead of hard power. Because of this, Chalmers Johnson was on the money when he said that Clinton was a better imperialist than his successor.
But the most disturbing aspect of the 1990s was the willingness of liberals to not only accept Clinton policy, but celebrate it in the name of political expediency. With a lot of liberals having become middle to upper middle class during the Reagan era, they now had no trouble espousing socially progressive economic views while supporting a Democratic President that was privileging capital over the proletariat to a degree not experienced since Grover Cleveland. Not surprisingly, they also supported US air strikes against what remained of Yugoslavia, appeasing liberals by characterizing it as a humanitarian intervention to protect the Kosovars from genocide and ethnic cleansing. But, after Clinton had rendered the Serbs prostrate, neither he nor his liberal supporters expressed any concern, much less took any action, to stop the ethnic cleansing of Serbs by Kosovars. With the opening of the Serbian economy to foreign investment and a new, state of the art military base, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, US policy objectives had been achieved. And, anyway, as Thomas Friedman, always at the ready to advocate for collective punishment when it doesn't involve Americans or Israelis, said, the Serbs were getting exactly what they deserved. Both the air war in Kosovo and Serbia and the Iraqi sanctions foreshadowed subsequent interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. Meanwhile, the people of Balkans remain amongst the poorest on the European continent.
As the sun set on the Clinton presidency, the United States was the world's preeminent economic and military power. His economic advisors, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, along with Federal Reserve Board Chair, Alan Greenspan, freed speculative capital from the chains of the US regulatory system. There was no longer any separation between investment and commercial banking, and transnational firms were now free to create a proliferation of exotic financial instruments for investors for distribution all over the world. Meanwhile, these same instituitons, through the US controlled World Bank and International Monetary Fund, forced countries all around the world to reduce spending on essential public services like health, education and welfare, so as to create conditions favorable to speculative investment. And, then, seemingly out of nowhere, the lightening bolt struck in Seattle in November 1999.
The protests against the World Trade Organization were a warning sign that the newly created neoliberal order was too turbulent to be sustainable over the long term. But liberal democracies like the US and those of the EU no longer had any place for social democratic reform. Political figures like Blair, Clinton, Schroeder and Chirac interred the prospect of achieving Social Democracy within representative democratic systems initially advocated by the German SDP at the dawn of the 20th Century. Lenin may have been discredited as a consequence of the authoritarianism of the old USSR, but his condemnations of electoral political processes ring as true today as they did when he made them. One finds an echo of this perspective in my Vote or Die series on the failings of the US political system. But I could never be a Bolshevik. So, I began to engage with the social vision of anarchism, a socialist alternative equally suspicious of the false claims of social inclusion put forward by liberal democrats.
It didn't happen right away, though. In 2000, I hoped that Ralph Nader could garner a sufficient percentage of the vote to obtain federal campaign funds for the Green Party, and thus provide a stronger, institutionalized left alternative to the two major parties. In other words, I still placed too much emphasis upon the political process as the primary means for transforming American society. Given the capture of the Democratic Party by finance capitalists, I wasn't surprised when Democrats provided only token opposition to the Bush program of war, curtailment of civil liberties, centralization of the media and increased subsidization of the wealthy. All, to varying degrees, were at the center of the Clinton project, and, in the aftermath of 9/11, probably would have been pursued in a similar fashion. Greenspan remained at the head of the Federal Reserve with bipartisan support, where, after the bursting of the stock market bubble he blew in the mid to late 1990s, he proceeded to inflate an even larger one in real estate. The bubble generated enough money to be distributed all around, especially in the Congress, until the music stopped in 2007.
In 2004, I took the Trotskyite advice of Tariq Ali, and urged a vote for John Kerry, despite his many flaws, persuaded by Ali's claim that the electoral defeat of the neoconservatives would energize global opposition to US imperialism. Somewhere along the line, Ali and I forgot to notice that there are a lot of Democratic neoconservatives, too, or, even worse, failed to recognize that the term itself is used to deflect attention from the imperial aspirations that have defined the US since its inception. I guess that I still couldn't let go of the glamour associated with the political process, one of the great spectacles ever produced, it puts Cecil B. DeMille to shame. If his most recent New Left Review article is any indication, Ali gets it now, at least as far as the Democratic Party is concerned.
During the period, I paid close attention to developments in South America, more so than liberals and even many leftists, and it was there that I began to perceive an alternative. Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina have all been known for the prominence of direct action social movements that have pushed their countries to the left. Accordingly, I periodically post on events in these countries, but more from a social than a political perspective. Each country has moved left to varying degrees, but none of them have decentralized power and attacked the concentration of wealth necessary to effectively challenge the global capitalist order. I have drawn two lessons from the South American experience. First, that any meaningful change within the US and the world will result from mass, direct action social movements, organized around non-hierarchical collective values, and, second, that such movements will only succeed if they confront the core principles of capitalism, private property, wage labor and commodification.
The collapse of the global financial system in 2007 and 2008 has brought this conflict into sharp relief. Everywhere (with the possible exception of the People's Republic of China), the solution is the same, the expropriation of wealth from the bottom 90% to 95% for the top 5% to 10%, with the expectation that their recapitalization will regenerate the investment capital required to finance the reignition of the global economy. Perhaps, it will work, but the social turmoil associated with the effort will be extreme, so extreme that the social control measures required to contain may be too costly for the system to sustain itself. At this time, anarchism is the only credible socialist alternative, one unencumbered with the autocratic baggage of Marxist-Leninism and the accomodation of Social Democracy. Capitalism took centuries to attain its preemince, so, too, it may take centuries for the prefigurative collective social vision of anarchism to take root. People will have to rediscover their capacity to collectively organize themselves within their communities, and relinquish their attachment to the hierarchies and gratification associated with nationalism, private property and wage labor. It will take many collaborative, visionary projects, and many will fail before such a powerful, entrenched social order is overcome. But is there enough time?
Labels: Activism, American Empire, Anarchism, Elections, Marxism, Neoliberalism, New Left Review, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Vote or Die
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
Vote or Die: The United Kingdom
Labels: Elections, Labour Party, Neoliberalism, United Kingdom, Vote or Die
During the recent congressional debates on the reform of health care and the student loan program, Jane Hamsher of firedoglake exposed the revolving door that high level Democratic advisors go through as they travel back and forth between the government and the private sector. She emphasized two case studies: Rahm Emanuel and Jamie Gorelick. Gorelick was a Deputy Attorney General during the Clinton administration. Emanuel, as we all know, is the current White House Chief of Staff.
Gorelick left the Clinton White House in 1997 for an appointment to Fannie Mae, a government sponsored enterprise that serves as the leading market maker in the secondary mortgage market, serving under Franklin Raines as Vice Chair. She received over 26 million dollars in bonuses despite serious accounting irregularities during this period. Upon leaving in 2003, she became a lobbyist. According to Hamsher:
Not surprisingly, Gorelick recently profited from her Democratic Party pedigree by lobbying against a student loan program reform that shifts billions of dollars from banking fees to the provision of more loans for students. Another former Clinton administration figure, John Podesta, did so as well. Amazingly, this one actually got through Congress as part of the reconciliation process used to pass the health care reform bill, one of the rare instances in which the Obama administration carried out a progressive policy against the wishes of transnational financial institutions.Gorelick has benefitted tremendously as lobbying money has flowed to the Democratic side of the aisle. In addition to SLM Corp (Sallie Mae), she also represents the scandal-plagued investment bank Lazard Freres. She’s also lobbied for JP Morgan, BP America, Lucent, the Medicines Company and Google in the past.
Rahm Emanuel worked in the Clinton White House as well, serving as a senior advisor until 1998. He then took a position as an investment banker, earning 16.2 million dollars in bonuses between 1998 and 2002. In 2000 and 2001, he served on the board on Freddie Mac, another government sponsored enterprise that serves a market maker for mortgages, earning $320,000 in bonuses. Financial and accounting irregularities at Freddie Mac, and Gorelick's old employer, Fannie Mae, subsequently played a prominent role in the meltdown in global financial markets in 2007 and 2008, necessitating an enormous bailout, a bailout that is ongoing and without limitation.
As noted by Hamsher, the Chicago Tribune reported that Freddie Mac inflated bonuses to board members like Emanuel by using dubious accounting practices to misrepresent earnings:
Hamsher responded by submitting, along with Grover Norquist, a demand that Attorney General Eric Holder investigate Emanuel's activities as a Freddie Mac board member. Pro-Obama liberals were, quite predictably, more outraged at Hamsher for submitting the complaint along with Norquist than they were about the possibility that Emanuel may have personally benefitted from fraud at Freddie Mac. Jane, G-d bless her, she still believes in the system, and probably Santa and the Easter Bunny, too.Before its portfolio of bad loans helped trigger the current housing crisis, mortgage giant Freddie Mac was the focus of a major accounting scandal that led to a management shake-up, huge fines and scalding condemnation of passive directors by a top federal regulator.
One of those allegedly asleep-at-the-switch board members was Chicago's Rahm Emanuel—now chief of staff to President Barack Obama—who made at least $320,000 for a 14-month stint at Freddie Mac that required little effort.
But, for those of us on the left, the experiences of Gorelick, Podesta and Emanuel raise more troubling questions about the plausibility of implementing progressive policies that prioritize people over capital. In my first Vote or Die post, I emphasized the failings of US electoral politics, the extent to which it disenfranchises millions of people, the difficulty of discerning what the candidates really mean and the fact that it is used to legitimize governance by claiming that we all have a voice in the process when, in fact, we don't. Other entries have addressed the power of large corporations and international capital in dictating outcomes and the unwillingness of elected officials to even respond to our inquiries. Most recently, I observed that the recent Supreme Court campaign finance decision intensifies these problems, and even empowers large, undemocratic unions to speak for us, despite the fact that they don't do it very well.
Hamsher's disclosures about Gorelick, Podesta and Emanuel reveal yet another problem: the fact that, even if you elect the President you want, despite all the impediments, the President and his staff are personally motivated to implement policies dictated by capital. Upon leaving office, Obama, like Reagan, Clinton and the Bushes, will receive millions of dollars for speaking appearances. Obama, as the first African American president, will, in all likelihood, demand fees substantially greater than any President who preceded him. But there's a catch. He's not going to get those fees, and the adulation that comes with them, if he seeks to become the next FDR, or even the next TR. The US political system no longer has a place for the progressivism of past presidents.
For aides, the inducments, as shown by Emanuel and Gorelick, are seductive. Does anyone really believe that Emanuel knew anything about investment banking in 1998? Yet, there he was, making 16.2 million dollars in bonuses over 5 years, after participating in an administration that entered into NAFTA, implemented a telecommunications reform that allowed the emergence of a large media oligopoly and took down the wall between commercial banks and investment ones. In January 2009, he returned to the White House with the perspective of the bankers that he worked with so profitably. Meanwhile, Gorelick made even more in bonuses, over 26 million, and parlayed her personal relationships and access for well paying financial clients, asserting their interest over the public interest. And they are just two examples among many. The career path is obvious. As long as you facilitate policies for the benefit of capital, you can get unimaginably rich yourself.
Or, to put it differently, by serving the lords of capital, you can become one, too. Emanuel, it should be noted, started out in politics as part of a consumer rights organization, Illinois Public Action. For us on the left, though, the troubling question is, how can we expect a movement towards Social Democracy in the US, given the obstacles and perverse incentives of the existing political system? And, the answer is, of course, we can't. Certainly, not a very comforting one, but one that is difficult to refute. As long as economic power resides in the hands of a few, political power will as well, regardless of the outward appearance of a participatory system.
Labels: American Empire, Democrats, Elections, firedoglake, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Postmodernism, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Vote or Die
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Some of you may recall my recent reference to T's analysis over at Pink Scare on the limitations of the electoral process in a capitalist system:
Now, entering stage left is lenin over at Lenin's Tomb, with a well timed post that couldn't be more germane to the subject:Thus, if you're committed to human emancipation, if you're committed to radically rethinking economic and social organization, Trotsky's worry is that you cannot accomplish this within the parameters of parliamentary procedures under capitalism.
Here's the argument for why this might be the case. Holders of economic power can make use of this power outside of the electoral arena. Capitalists can make threats. They lay off politically active workers that are 'trouble makers', they can move their operations to other places, they can close factories, they can threaten democratically-elected governments with disinvestment, layoffs, etc. They may purchase and privately control and own media institutions. Economic power is not relinquished without a fight. And even when regulations and limits are imposed upon capitalists, they will relentlessly deploy their economic power to game the system and find ways to get the limits and regulations repealed. Witness the slicing and dicing of the regulatory apparatus put in place in the 1930s over the period from 1973-present. It took a while, but their incessant pressure and efforts eventually paid off.
It is also crucial to point out here that the struggle to reconfigure economic power via electoral institutions never occurs on a level, fair playing field. This struggle always occurs within a social formation already organized around concentrations of class power. Moreover, even when a progressive left-wing government is elected, it runs up against the entrenched extra-electoral power of capitalists. An instructive case study here is socialist head of state Salvador Allende in Chile circa 1970-73.
Allende was elected by a broad coalition of center-left and left-wing parties in Chile amidst uproar from the landed elites and ruling classes in Chile. When Allende tried to reform economic institutions and put land reform into law, his efforts were stonewalled and sabotaged by economic elites who used their power to "go on strike", lay off workers, suffocate the economy and try to bring the country to its knees.
As discussed here many times over the last couple of years, we are living through one of the most remorseless economic rationalizations ever attempted, one based upon centralizing more money and power within elites while subjecting the workforce to increased insecurity in every aspect of their lives. The bursting of a historically unprecented speculative bubble has set the stage for an attempt to restructure the global economy along lines that predate the emergence of trade unionism and social democracy.The current speculative attack on the Euro is a very powerful vote against EU states that investors (capitalists) do no believe have moved swiftly enough to cut their budget deficits. The rules of the Stability and Growth Pact agreed among EU member states say that budget deficits must not exceed 3% of GDP. Those rules were designed to put a cap on public spending. They have provided the occasion for various EU governments to slash and burn welfare and public services, and they effectively insulate any government that wishes to do so from criticism - this is the cost of being a member of the EU, they say. Of course, the rules are subject to interpretation and haggling, and two of the most powerful EU states - namely France and Germany - were able to force through some get-out clauses when they went in to deep recession in the early 2000s and found themselves repreatedly breaching the 3% limit. Nevertheless, EU member states are now being pressured to get their own budgets back within that limit.
Greece has been the subject of investors' disapprobation lately, with a deficit of 12.5% (slightly lower than the UK, at 13%, and comparable to Ireland and Spain). The government has been instructed to look for ways to make big spending cuts to meet this EU target. And though it was elected on a promise not to cut wages, the spending cuts agreed at the EU include a 10% cut in wages. George Papandreou, defending this betrayal, was able to cite a speculative attack on government bonds, which drove up the yield (the interest repayable) to more than twice that of Germany - which means it costs the Greek government more than twice as much to fund its deficit. He said: Greece is at the centre of an unprecedented speculative attack: we cannot be at the mercy of creditors. Despite our tragic mistakes, our fate is today defined by rating agencies that bear responsibility for the 'bubble' that led to the global crisis in the first place. So, the pressure being applied by this 'virtual parliament' of capitalists is being used to deflect criticism of the elected parliament of Greece while it does the exact opposite of what it was elected to do. This is Pasok's only answer to the trade unionists who will be undertaking mass strike action this week.
The effects of such policies are not difficult to establish. The Irish government, arguably the most enthusiastic neoliberal state in Europe, didn't hang about. Its response to the economic crisis was to impose several austerity budgets which depressed GDP by 5%.
If the attempt succeeds, as it has to date, it will cause generations of future leftists to wonder whether the creation of the bubble and its subsequent collapse was by design. A conspiracy theory of sorts, for those leftists that ascribe events more to human agency than to the interrelated structures of capitalist society. Life is messier than that, and not reduceable to a linear narrative along a straight line, but one could understand why they might consider the apparent cause and effect relationship as indicative of a calculated effort, especially when one looks at the persistence of the effort to cut Medicare and Social Security benefits here in the US, as expressed by Treasury Secretary Geithner last Sunday. For those of us living through this nightmare, the most important aspect of the situation remains the failure of any effective opposition to emerge.
Labels: American Empire, Anarchism, Elections, Global Recession, Marxism, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Vote or Die
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Faced with this problem, Obama has responded by turning his economic policy over to Wall Street, his foreign policy over to the Pentagon and his health care program to pharmaceutical and health insurance companies. Confronted with the same challenge in Venezuela, Chavez persuaded the populace to change the constitution and distributed the benefits of the country's oil wealth throughout the society, provoking an unsuccessful 2002 coup and a 2004 recall referendum. Evo Morales has pursued a similar approach in Bolivia. Chavez has won numerous elections in Venezuela with substantial pluralities (all greater than the margin of Obama's 2008 victory), and Morales recently won reelection with a nearly 2 to 1 margin. Both rose to power with the assistance of social movements that challenged the existing political structure by giving expression to the grievances of marginalized people.Thus, if you're committed to human emancipation, if you're committed to radically rethinking economic and social organization, Trotsky's worry is that you cannot accomplish this within the parameters of parliamentary procedures under capitalism.
Here's the argument for why this might be the case. Holders of economic power can make use of this power outside of the electoral arena. Capitalists can make threats. They lay off politically active workers that are 'trouble makers', they can move their operations to other places, they can close factories, they can threaten democratically-elected governments with disinvestment, layoffs, etc. They may purchase and privately control and own media institutions. Economic power is not relinquished without a fight. And even when regulations and limits are imposed upon capitalists, they will relentlessly deploy their economic power to game the system and find ways to get the limits and regulations repealed. Witness the slicing and dicing of the regulatory apparatus put in place in the 1930s over the period from 1973-present. It took a while, but their incessant pressure and efforts eventually paid off.
It is also crucial to point out here that the struggle to reconfigure economic power via electoral institutions never occurs on a level, fair playing field. This struggle always occurs within a social formation already organized around concentrations of class power. Moreover, even when a progressive left-wing government is elected, it runs up against the entrenched extra-electoral power of capitalists. An instructive case study here is socialist head of state Salvador Allende in Chile circa 1970-73.
Allende was elected by a broad coalition of center-left and left-wing parties in Chile amidst uproar from the landed elites and ruling classes in Chile. When Allende tried to reform economic institutions and put land reform into law, his efforts were stonewalled and sabotaged by economic elites who used their power to "go on strike", lay off workers, suffocate the economy and try to bring the country to its knees.
Multinational corporations in Chile such as the International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT) set to work quickly to fight against Allende, and they weren't interested in trying to win the battle over electoral terms (a battle, the company's owners realized, they'd have little way of winning in the face of a broad popular mandate for Allende's policies). We now know from memos circulated amongst elites in ITT and the American-owned Kennecott Copper Company that their goals were to "“to strangle the Chilean economy, sow panic, and foment social disorder in order to encourage and create the opportunity for the armed forces to step in and replace Allende". Also- their influence convinced the US and related institutions like the World Bank to impose an economic blockade on Chile to help the destabilization effort.
The point of this is that all of these efforts were effective against a democratically-elected representative government precisely because of the concentrations of economic power under capitalism. Admittedly, "dictatorship" somewhat overstates the case, but the Allende case makes the point that this stranglehold on productive, economic power by a small class must be challenged for democracy to be possible.
Chavez and Morales are, it seems, bent upon proving Trotsky wrong (and, by extension, his nemesis, Kautsky, the turn of the century German Social Democrat who advocated socialism by recourse to parliamentary democracy, correct), while Obama, consistent with Trotsky's analysis, but contrary to his intention, has adopted a strategy of pragmatic accommodation with the dominance of capital within the US political system. LIke DeGaulle, both Chavez and Morales will eventually confront the dilemma of their succession, and the survival of a political movement reliant upon charismatic leadership, no matter how long they delay it. Conversely, just as Obama has carried out a seamless transition of many of the policies of the Bush presidency into his own, so will his successor. While, unlike Chavez and Morales, there is a limit upon how many terms Obama can serve, there are no such limits upon the capital friendly policies that have characterized his presidency to date.
Labels: American Empire, Anarchism, Barack Obama, Bolivia, Elections, Hugo Chavez, Marxism, Neoliberalism, Vote or Die
Thursday, January 21, 2010
UPDATE: Vote or Die (Part 6)
Second, the only institutions capable of raising large sums of money to finance campaigns to compete with corporate funded candidates are labor unions. Admittedly, this has always been true, but now, the proportion of individual donations in comparison to labor contributions and corporate contributions will be graphed with individual donations near the bottom, labor union ones somewhere between the bottom and the middle and corporate ones in excess of both. As a result, corporations will not only be dominant, but the decisive voice in relation to attempts to implement progressive policies to constrain them will rest with the unions. Upset that Andy Stern of SEIU and Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO abandoned single payer and the public option during drafting of health care reform legislation? Dissatisfied that neither of them are willing to challenge US militarism and demand that the government redirect Pentagon expenditures towards the fulfillment of domestic needs? Better learn to love it, because the Supreme Court has made them the godfathers of US progressivism, such as it is.
Lastly, we can also reasonably conclude that the many of the members of the US Senate, regardless of party, are pleased with the decision, because they confirmed Bush appointees Roberts and Alito, two justices whose votes were necessary for the Court's 5-4 decision, in the face of siginificant opposition. Some of this opposition emphasized their judicial records in support of corporations and more repressive measures of social control. But a majority of the Senate, including quite a number of Democrats, had no problem with it, and why should they? Now, they can defend their incumbency against potential threats with even larger sums of corporate largesse.
Labels: American Empire, Elections, Neoliberalism, SEIU, Supreme Court, Unions, Vote or Die
Vote or Die (Part 5)
You are now free to vote for choices put forward by corporations, and exercise your democratic rights. Of course, this has always been true to a significant extent, but any pretense to the contrary has been stripped away. Just as the First Amendment gives you the right to buy your own printing press, and compete with the consolidated, transnational media, it also gives you the right to campaign, or support like minded candidates, against those financed by enormous sums of corporate capital. There's a reason why the David versus Goliath story is so compelling: the giants usually prevail.Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.
The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace will corrupt democracy.
Labels: Activism, American Empire, Elections, Neoliberalism, Postmodernism, Supreme Court, Vote or Die
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
If you spend any time following the raucous debate, it gets tiresome pretty quickly. A few participants are willing to acknowledge that Obama signalled his willingness to serve the interests of capital when he took no action to challenge the cloture rule in the Senate, the rule that requires 60 votes to cut off debate. By doing so, Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid empowered conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans by making it necessary to obtain their support to get any legislation to the White House for signature. It was all very convenient, a ready made excuse as to why it was necessary to escalate the war in Afghanistan, continue to bail out the banks and transform health care reform into a government subsidization of the insurance industry and pharmaceutical companies.
Hence, the public would just have to learn the virtues of generational patience, and accept that it will take not just years, but decades, to accomplish all those things that they expected from an Obama presidency. But, for those of us to the left of liberals, to the left of the American electoral process, the Coakley-Brown race is a textbook example of how the system is rigged against any meaningful participation by many Americans. If Brown wins, health care reform is either killed, or passed in an even more menacing form, while if Coakley wins, you get health care reform passed with a few fig leafs, such as the recent deal between the White House and the AFL-CIO on the so-called Cadillac plan tax, that do not alter its regressive features. One can anticipate similar outcomes in relation to other future measures designed to address the current economic downturn. Given that the Congress is firmly in the hands of the Lieberman/Nelson/Baucus axis, it hard to even identify any differences that would result in foreign policy as a result of the election of either candidate.
Liberals understood this very clearly, as appeals for support for Coakley took on more and more hysterical tones. If Brown won, they screamed, Republicans would return to power and destroy the country. Voters who refused to respond to the rhetorical horsewhipping administered by Democratic activists deserved what they will get. Left unanswered, of course, was whether voters deserve what they are currently getting from Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress. Coakley supporters were left with such emotional appeals, because there have nothing to substantively say that would persuade voters that Coakley, and by extension, Obama, have any intention of challenging the plutocracy that controls the government.
Perhaps, such fearmongering will work just enough to carry Coakley through to victory, and put off the day of reckoning until next November. Obama and Reid could respond to a Coakley defeat by getting progressive legislation through the Senate with just 51 votes, and thus, reinvigorate a moribund liberalism with a record of populist accomplishment, but that's about as likely as the prospect of the US military abandoning the control over Haiti that it has seized in response to the earthquake. If given a choice, the middle class looks likely to gravitate to a party that celebrates its exercise of power for the benefit of capital, as opposed to a party that dresses its corporate friendly policies in the garb of an ersatz populism. One wonders whether the collapse of the Obama presidency will plant the seeds of a direct action political movement based upon the recognition that the electoral process is no longer capable of addressing the needs of the populace. If so, it will take awhile for the seeds to germinate.
Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Barack Obama, Elections, Health Care, Liberals, Postmodernism, Vote or Die
