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
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Goodbye, Dennis the Menace (Part 3)
Given that Kucinich was never especially popular, at least as defined by the national electoral process, and that he was never effective legislatively, it would, strictly speaking, be inaccurate to even describe him as a has-been. Would it be more precise, using baseball lingo, to call him a never was? Well, not exactly, that's a little too harsh. Merriam-Webster defines never was as one that has attained no rank, success, or eminence. He did, it must be conceded, wins elections to become the mayor of Cleveland and a congressional representative, and he did attain a sort of avant-garde eminence amongst a small group of progressives, for whom he singularly represented their political impotence.
Kucinich was, in effect, a reed by which these progressives clung to the hope that the US could be moved in a more socially responsible direction through the electoral process. In this, his presidential campaigns anticipated the enthusiastic, pragmatic embrace of Obama in 2008 by a much larger progressive constituency. In both instances, progressives underestimated the extent to which the electoral process had degenerated into a duopoly where the two major parties competed for the privilege of which one could better serve the interests of capital. If Kucinich really wanted to perform a public service, he would expose this in relation to his experiences in Congress by writing and publishing his memoirs. Somehow, I doubt that will happen. At heart, he's a team player, as he showed when he voted for health care reform in 2010.
His defenders might contend that Kucinich was in the tradition of Peter Camejo, a revolutionary political figure who, unlike Camejo, actually got elected to office. Camejo, formerly a highly respected leadership figure in the Socialist Workers Party, subsequently participated in the creation of the Green Party and ran for the governorship and the Senate here in California as a third party candidate. It is, of course, a strained comparison. Kucinich was obviously no revolutionary, and, as many have observed, he performed the function of keeping purportedly rebellious progressives inside the Democratic Party, especially during presidential election years. He would run in the primaries, garner a small, enthusiastic vote from progressives that might otherwise be tempted to support a third party effort, and then dutifully support the nominee, no matter how far removed from his own perspective. Not surprisingly, the other, more mainstream, better financed candidates generally ignored him.
Camejo put the people first and the party second, while Kucinich invariably did the opposite. That's why he was expelled from the Socialist Workers Party. Beyond this, he participated in the electoral process as a means of educating people about the urgency of a radical, revolutionary transformation of the US. His efforts can therefore be paradoxically characterized as one of many foreshadowings of Occupy, a marked contrast to Kucinich's facilitation of the cooption of progressives by Obama. Kucinich yet again revealed the importance of his need to remain part of the congressional club when he voted for a bill on February 27th that would criminalize protest at many federal buildings and facilities, the Federal Restricted Grounds and Improvement Act. As with his vote for health care reform, he must have known that it was an act of desperation because of the contempt that those who run the Democratic Party have for him. Sadly, by trying to split the difference, he also earned the contempt of those for whom he sought to represent.
Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Health Care, Liberals, 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
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
By way of background, it is important to note that the public option was a watered down version of single payer, designed to provide an acceptable alternative for a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress. Perhaps, you recall that the passage of health care reform with a public option and the availability of generic drugs, also voted down in Congress, was mentioned by progressives as one of the reasons that it was essential for to vote for Obama and the Democrats in 2008.The public option, it seems, was more about creating a transfer station for those health care reform supporters traveling from single payer to the individual mandate than it was about an actual policy that could be effectively implemented.The book is Fighting For Our Health, by Richard Kirsch, who directed the advocacy group Health Care for America Now during the push for reform. HCAN is a well financed umbrella group backed by scores of liberal groups, unions, and other reformers — making Kirsch a close witness to the entire saga. He confirms that the White House treated the public option like a bargaining chip with powerful industry players, and believes that when his group became most critical of the bill mid-way through the fight, that top White House aides sought to have him canned.
The White House had negotiated a number of deals with the health industry, designed to win their support for reform, including agreeing to oppose a robust public option, which would have the greatest clout to control how much providers got paid, writes Kirsch, largely confirming what has become an open secret in Washington.
Kirsch’s book is replete with similar stories. Thematically, it centers on contradictions within the Democratic party, and Obama himself, that gave rise to the infighting that marked the debate. To keep factions from spinning apart, Kirsch suggests, the administration was averse from the outset to the idea that progressives and sympathetic stakeholders should play an outside game, pressuring the President and problem Democrats in Congress to pass robust reforms.
Upon reading the Talking Points Memo review, one is immediately struck by the fact that the White House could not even tolerate the mild advocacy of an Obama friendly organization like HCAN. In the end, Kirsch got back in line, as HCAN urged its supporters to call Congress to get the final version of the bill passed, warts and all, as a visit to the HCAN homepage demonstrates. HCAN is therefore a cautionary story about how a progressive organization created for a particular, socially beneficial purpose ended up as an advocate for what it purportedly loathed, a neoliberal health care reform that places much of the costs on the middle class, although one can plausible argue that this was the true objective of those who created HCAN from the inception.
Not surprisingly, if the Talking Points Memo review of his book gives us an accurate impression of the scope of his book, Kirsch evades these unpleasant truths. Even today, it seems, Kirsch just can't be forthcoming with those who would support his objectives. Kirsch and HCAN refused, during the legislative process, to inform the public about what had already been done to the public option, and, in fact, continued to lead people to believe that, through public pressure, legislators could be induced to pass it. It was all just one big Kabuki show, where Kirsch and HCAN, with the support of labor unions like AFSCME and SEIU, and progressive groups like MoveON.org, mislead progressives and workers because they felt it was more important to dissemble and maintain an illusory influence with the White House than it was to be truthful with those who made phone calls, sent letters and organized rallies in support of the public option. Indeed, Kirsch is still being dishonest with this book, because, according to Talking Points Memo, it attributes the refusal of Obama to fight for a public option to a failure of political nerve and a misguided political strategy, when, instead, it is entirely consistent with the neoliberal, financial sector orientation of his policies.
Put bluntly, Kirsch and HCAN believe that people like you and me need to understand that we have to accept such manipulation as part of the effort to implement the progressive agenda. If this sounds familiar, it should. It is exactly what many of the Strauss influenced neoconservatives say about foreign policy. From this loss of credibility in the legislative process and the institutionalized progressive organizations that considered it pragmatic to manipulate their supporters for the benefit of the White House, we now have Occupy. The failure of the progressive mobilization for health care reform and a Keynesian stimulus plan for the economy induced many to draw the inescapable conclusion that the electoral process merely serves the purpose of legitimizing corporate control of the US political system. They embraced the direct action ethos of Occupy as a form of resistance.
Labels: Activism, Barack Obama, Democrats, Health Care, Liberals, MoveON.org, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street, Unions, Vote or Die
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
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
In the article, James Campbell describes Ali's decision to write fiction, especially the Islam Quintet, in light of the recent publication of the final novel in the series, Night of the Golden Butterfly:When asked if the experience of being a storyteller has softened the rigidity of his stance on the relationship between art and politics, he begins to talk again about his move "sideways" into films and Channel 4. Is he ever troubled by self-doubt? Yes I am. To be fair to myself . . . we had doubts even at the time. I never had any illusions about Stalinism or that style of society. What we hoped was that it would be replaced by something much better, instead of being a total regression. But that didn't happen.
His early non-fiction is stamped with the mark of total self-belief, and faith in the ideology for which he was fighting, which can lead to moments of unintended humour now. In Street Fighting Years, Ali describes how he asked Jagger to write out the words of Street Fighting Man, to be printed in facsimile in the Black Dwarf. He agreed immediately. We photographed the sheet of paper and I threw the original into the wastepaper basket. No one in the office thought this was sacrilegious. The cult of the individual is always a substitute for collective action.
Ali's intention on Thursday was not to vote – for the first time. I can't vote for New Labour, and of course the question of voting Conservative doesn't arise. I'll probably go and spoil my ballot, just so as not to be passive.
Having read the previous installments of the Quintet, I recommend them, and hope that Night of the Butterfly is up to the standard of its predecessors. Ali deserves credit for reinvigorating the tired genre of historical fiction with his own subjective vision of the past. All four are excellent, but I found the poignancy of the The Stone Woman, a novel set during final years of the Ottoman Empire, wherein the collapse of the old world is about to unleash the genocidal demons of a new one, particularly compelling. If there can be said to be a dominant theme that runs through all the novels, it is the horrible consequences that invariably ensue from religious intolerance.He has not forsaken his opposition to neoliberal economic policies (capitalism, in a word) but is resigned to the fact that the predicted disintegration of the system has not occurred. It's a problem people have had to come to terms with at different times in history: what do you do in a period of defeat? In his case, the realignment took an unexpected form: he turned to writing fiction. The second act of the drama of Tariq Ali opened after the collapse of the Berlin wall in 1989.
I had already begun to shift my priorities, which were totally political until the early 1980s, by forming Bandung Films. Jeremy Isaacs, who was then head of Channel 4, asked me to make some programmes. Time to move off the streets and be on the other side, in terms of looking at people and not being one of them. But writing fiction, which involves months of solitary endeavour, was a new sort of commitment. Ali's first novel, Redemption, a roman à clef about feuding Trotskyites in London, was published in 1990. The next year he worked on an entirely different sort of story, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, which entered an imaginative realm no less important to him, the historical world of Islam. It depicts the conflict between Christians and Muslims at the end of the 15th century, during the Spanish inquisition, and was to be the first of a five-part series called the Islam Quintet. It is concluded with the publication this month of Night of the Golden Butterfly.
Labels: Islam, Religion, Tariq Ali, Vote or Die
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
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
Friday, January 29, 2010
All of these figures deserve the praise that has accompanied their deaths, but, perhaps, it is time for reflection as well. Recently, Diana Block, an American radical of the 1970s and 1980s, wrote a moving autobiography entitled, Arm the Spirit, published by AK Press. I posted a two part review of it here last April and May. In it, Block relates her experiences of personal empowerment against the backdrop of political failure. She encourages readers to ponder to what extent she, and those that she worked with, succeeded, and to what extent they failed, and, even more importantly, why they were unable to persuade more people to rally in support of their vision of society.
It is a central question for these radicals, especially American ones like Zinn, Takaki and Block, as the Europeans, Gowan, Arrighi, Bensaid and Harman, are manifestations of a culture that encourages more self-reflection. Block, to her credit, confronted it as best she could, and it would have been mesmerizing to hear or read what Zinn had to say about it as well. Perhaps, he did, and I missed it. I concede that I have not followed his statements and writings avidly. My impression, however, is that Zinn, like most others of his era, evaded the question by treating as a problem of inadequate education. If we just keep telling people why bigotry, militarism, poverty and, yes, even capitalism, are bad, they will eventually figure it out.
Well, maybe so. But it didn't happen during Zinn's lifetime, and his insistence upon support for Democratic presidential candidates, while emphasizing the necessity of social movements to push them into doing the right things (much like his contemporary, Takaki), did not spark the popular imagination. Indeed, the Open Letter to Barack Obama that he, and many other activists and academics, signed in the summer of 2008 helped to motivate me to abandon the electoral process entirely, and post an ongoing critique of it under the label Vote or Die. If it wasn't obvious at the time, it is now evident that the letter represents an abject capitulation of the left in the face of the most rigorous rationalization of the global economy by finance capital since the late 1970s and 1980s. Interestingly, Ellsberg was not an initial signatory of the letter posted on the The Nation website, although I can't say as to whether he added his name afterwards.
As I said, perhaps Zinn addressed this subject in the final years of life, and was unable to get people to listen. If so, I'd be very interested in what he said or wrote, if anyone visiting this site can direct me to places where his remarks can be found. Because, if we really want to show respect for people like Zinn and others of his generation, we should seek to understand and learn from their failures as well as celebrate their personal bravery, integrity and accomplishments. Otherwise, we risk reducing the significance of their lives to the sterility of an innocuous personality cult.
Labels: Activism, AK Press, Civil Rights, Daniel Ellsberg, Imperialism, Neoliberalism, Obituaries, 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
Thursday, January 07, 2010
Today, I am returning to the subject from a more mundane angle to expose the lack of personal political participation that has been purposefully built into the system. On New Year's Day, Suzanne over at firedoglake complained about the failure of the White House to respond to a single point that she made in a letter that she sent on December 12th. She received a form letter that was addressed to Dear Friend, a letter that condescendingly lectured her about challenges that must be addressed. In her post, she sarcastically demanded that the White House say my name.
We have been subjected to such generic, non-responsive communication from our elected representatives for so long that we have normalized it, reducing it to a minor irritance. On the rare occasions that we do attempt to express our opinions, the receipt of such letters induce a why did I even bother response, a demoralization which appears to be the intention. But there are others that never receive such responses, and frequently obtain direct access to our representatives and their staffs. They are, of course, other elected officials, lobbyists and significant financial contributors. The personalized attention that they receive and the computerized form letters sent to everyone else constitutes the fault line between those who matter and the rest of us who do not. Policies are shaped to their benefit, while our phone calls, e-mails and letters are compressed into mere numbers, so many in support, so many in opposition. In many instances, the actual calculation is irrelevant, as demonstrated by the approval of NAFTA, the invasion of Iraq, the bailout and, most likely, the health care bill currently in conference, and the greater the gravity of the issue, the more irrelevant our quantified opinion.
Suzanne's post struck a nerve with me, because, last spring, after a typically unsatisfactory attempt to bring an issue to my state senator's attention, I pondered, how many times had I ever received a response to a phone call, e-mail or letter that just merely accurately characterized my inquiry? I didn't require that the response actually substantively address my inquiry with any degree of sincerity, intelligence or knowledge. Just that it accurately summarize the nature of my inquiry. Over the last 15 years, which was as far back as I could remember, the answer was, of course, ZERO. I couldn't remember one time that I received a response that indicated that the official's staffer had the slightest idea of what I was talking about. I'd be curious to know whether my experience is aberrational or not. I have written this post based upon the assumption that it isn't.
The implications of such a political process are profound. If our elected officials are either incapable of understanding what we are trying to tell them, or worse, deliberately refusing to do so, why should we participate in such a process? If they can't, or won't, understand us when we seek to communicate with them in plain English, why should we believe that they will comprehend the meaning of our electoral votes? One of the conceits of the progressive blogosphere has been that its ability to shape public opinion and raise campaign funds would shatter this hierarchical form of political participation, but it has been pitilessly revealed as an indulgent romanticism by the Obama administration. Liberal democracy appears to be a form of government that enables capital to communicate with precision, while rendering the perspective of the populace itself more and more diffuse.
Labels: American Empire, Anarchism, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Elections, Neoliberalism, Postmodernism, Vote or Die
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Vote or Die (Part 2)
Public rejection of the bailout is threatening to the presidential candidates for two reasons: (1) it prevents the political parties from fulfilling their responsibility to reinforce the political and economic power of finance capital; and (2) it represents an alarming repudiation of the entire system by which the US economy, and much of the global one, is secretly regulated, through institutions like the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and influential banking houses like Goldman Sachs.Senators Barack Obama and John McCain put their battleground campaigning temporarily on hold and headed to Washington on Wednesday to vote in favor of the $700 billion financial bailout package, the consequences of which will help frame the remainder of the fall presidential race.
Mr. Obama intensified his efforts to rally support for the legislation as he sought to sell the idea to skeptical voters — and members of Congress — by presenting it as a plan to "safeguard the American economy."
"This plan is not perfect.,” Mr. Obama told thousands of people at a downtown rally here, not far from the Mississippi River. “Democrats and Republicans in Congress have legitimate concerns about it. I know many Americans share those concerns, but it is clear that this is what we must do right now to prevent a crisis from turning into a catastrophe."
In a speech in Missouri, Mr. McCain struck a similar tone on Wednesday as he characterized the urgency of the moment, which he called, "the greatest financial crisis of our lifetimes."
"It took Congress a while, and there were costs to these delays, but they have awakened to the danger," Mr. McCain told an audience in Independence, Mo. "And today, with the unity that this crisis demands, Congress will once again work to restore confidence and stability to the American economy."
Hence, it becomes essential for the candidates to proselytize for the bailout in a doomed effort to recover the lost prestige of these institutions. Otherwise, their influence will continue to dissipate in relation to their lost revenue and declining asset values. No longer able to justify their economic preeminence upon their centrality in the provision of credit and the incredible amount of capital that it attracted, both of which are now threatening their very survival, they have no recourse but seek a historically unprecedented governmental subsidy in order to preserve it. If it they get it, there is good reason to doubt that it will reverse the painful process of asset destruction caused by the deleveraging and accompanying deflation ignited by the bursting of the housing bubble.
After all, the initiatives undertaken by Paulson, Bernanke and the financial institutions that they regulate, like J.P. Morgan, Goldman, Bank of America and others, have been an abysmal failure in terms of restoring confidence to the financial markets. The release of hundreds of billions of dollars of liquidity through Federal Reserve loans secured by distressed collateralized debt obligations, the arranged marriages of Countrywide/Bank of America, J. P. Morgan/Bear Stearns, J.P. Morgan/Washington Mutual, and, possibly, within in a matter of days, Citicorp/Wachovia, as well as the shocking nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have merely been signposts along the road leading to the collapse of the neoliberal economic system.
An attempt to soften the consequences of this collapse by voluntarily releasing much of their power as part of a broader, relatively mild reformist strategy of rescuing the lower and middle classes, and thus, constructing a floor to falling demand and asset values, has never been seriously considered, except by a group of liberal House dissidents and earnest economists. Fund a program for the federal government to buy distressed mortgages directly from the borrowers? If the government is going to shell out $700B, wouldn't it be better if the government spent the money to relieve the borrowers of these onerous debts, thus freeing them to resume their role as the consumers who drive much of global economic growth? Permit bankruptcy courts to step into the role formerly played by banks and savings and loans by empowering them to enforce workouts of underwater loans upon lenders, resulting in much the same?
Forget about it. There is no place for pragmatism within the existing American economic orthodoxy. And if conditions deteriorate to an extent not seen since the mid-1970s, or, one shudders to say it, even the 1930s, then, there are always poor people, people of color and undocumented immigrants to blame. The willingness of the mortgage lending community to target the requirements of the Community Reinvestment Act as one of the causes of this crisis is not reassuring in this regard. It suggests that the financial sector will, if no alternative is perceived, manipulate the bigotries of racist and xenophobic elements to resist any progressive assault upon its autonomy.
Labels: American Empire, Anarchism, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama, Credit Crunch, Elections, Housing Bubble, Immigration, John McCain, Neoliberalism, Postmodernism, Racism, Vote or Die
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Vote or Die (Part 1)
There is no more generally accepted truism in this country that the notion that exercising the right to vote is always a good thing. People and parties may seek to intimidate others from doing it, or make it difficult for them to do it, but the concept of voting itself is considered an act of personal participation and empowerment. Conversely, refusing to do so is a form of civic treason and submission.
But it is really that simple? Consider, for example, that we live in socioeconomically diverse country with over three hundred million people, yet we retain a two party political system that solidified itself in 1800, when the country had a population of just over five million, mostly white, black and rural. Does our political system now provide sufficient means of participation and electoral alternatives so that it can be said to offer an opportunity for most citizens to give expression to their values?
The question really answers itself, doesn't it? Of course, it doesn't. The dirty secret of this republic is that it relies upon millions of alienated, captive voters to participate in elections, and, hence, legitimize them, even though their issues, their concerns and their values are nowhere to be seen in the candidates offered by the Republicans and the Democrats.
So, if you are one of these people, why should you vote? We all know the answer to this question, too. Most of us in this situation vote as a reflexive self-defense mechanism. On the left, we know that the US is capitalist and militaristic, so we try to discern which candidates will pursue less avaracious and violent policies domestically and abroad. This is pretty much the line of reasoning of those who signed the open letter to Obama.
Unfortunately, even if you are smart enough to interpret the opaque and contradictory messages put out by the candidates on these subjects, and make the right choice, such a reformist approach invariably pushes one into a position of active collusion with the actions of the candidate once elected. If you were a fiscal conservative in the 1980s, you found yourself rationalizing the profligacy of the Reagan presidency. If you were a social welfare services supporter of Clinton in the 1990s, you found yourself having to explain welfare reform. Unless, you just said to hell with them, which some do in this sort of situation.
Even if you do that, though, a lot of your friends still hold you responsible. After all, didn't you say that the candidate was a good guy? Why is she doing such terrible things now? Confronted with such hostility, the response is something along these lines: on balance, she's doing a good job. And, yes, republican democracy is one of those on balance activities. No one gets most, not to mention all, of what they want, it's a process of compromise.
And that might be acceptable if the US was more like a parliamentary democracy, with several parties that reflected social perspectives to the right and the left, as well as ones more libertarian and more collective. In that sort of system, we would be voting for candidates that more accurately, though still imperfectly, reflected our views. Once the election were over, the newly elected office holders would compete and compromise to develop policy.
In other words, we would have to accept the ultimate outcomes, because people with our perspective, as a fairly accurate representation of our presence in society, participated in that process. This gets to the heart of the problem, doesn't it? We don't get to vote for people who share our perspective, therefore it is not represented in the process, yet, paradoxically, we are compelled to accept the outcomes. This is a particularly sinister model of electoral politics and governance, because it marginalizes opposition to the operations of government through the illusion of popular participation.
We can find numerous instances of this sort of process at work. Indeed, the excerpt of the column by Werther, posted here yesterday, highlights one of the inevitable consequences: rule by an ignorant oligarchy who perpetually make horrible decisions to the detriment of most people other than themselves. But let's take the time to substantiate this process with a real historical example. In 2004, 2006 and now, 2008, millions of us opposed to the war in Iraq, and militaristically adventuresome policies elsewhere, have no prospect of electing a Congress that will take action in this direction. Much the same can be said for civil liberties and the urgency of government economic intervention to help distressed people instead of the wealthy. Yet our votes legitimize the perpetuation of existing policy.
Campaigns for the presidency increase this problem exponentially, with only two plausible candidates running, the Democratic one and the Republican one, all of us are expected to accept them as the sole vessels for or social hopes and aspirations. It's ludicrous, but it does work to a shocking degree. Woe to anyone who dares suggest voting for an alternative candidate, a McKinney, say, or a Nader, because they more closely reflect your political views. That's about the most heinous thing you can do.
After all, we are supposed to vote, but not for anyone who actually challenges the economic elite that runs the country, and, in fact, much of the world in association with other capitalists. Or, even worse, we are not supposed to use elections to organize ourselves in opposition to them. In the end, most people seem to understand that democracy, as understood in the US, isn't really about empowerment, and play along begrudingly, in the hope that something good might come out of it. Along these lines, Gaius has done marvelous work exposing the inherently autocratic nature of what transpires after a President is elected. They don't call it the imperial presidency for nothing.
So, is it possible that it is actually more empowering to repudiate this process and consciously refuse to participate, to refuse to vote at all? To say that I reject a system that is designed to render me powerless while simultaneously exploiting my involvement to legitimize itself? Is it more empowering to focus your energy upon dealing with political and social issues on a personal and collective basis outside the electoral process? To make demands upon institutions directly, instead of delegating this effort to elected officials who don't speak for us and never will? To consider, horror of horrors, that it might be more effective over time to challenge the fundamental social relations of this country through direct action with others? After enjoying the theatrics of the acceptance speeches of Obama and McCain, you might give it some thought. Because here, unlike in the US political system, you decide.
Labels: American Empire, Anarchism, Democrats, Elections, Neoliberalism, Postmodernism, Vote or Die
