●
Congratulations to
the Cuban patriots (the Cuban Five), the remaining three of whom were finally released from US jails for the
“crime” of making the world a safer place from US imperialism
(How extensive and racially and economically selective must a prison
system be before we can refer to the installations as concentration
camps?) All fair-minded people should rejoice at the moving reunion
of these internationalists with their families and their countrymen
and women!
Before
we are overwhelmed by adulation for President Obama's role in the
release of the remaining Cuban Five, a fawning process that has begun
in earnest, we should remind the adulators that it is bad form to
praise someone for doing what he or she should have done long before.
Nothing has really happened to precipitate a change in US-Cuban
relations at this moment except the passing of Obama's final national
election cycle-- a fact that suggests that Obama's welcome moves are
more political expediency than any serious change of heart. Those who
sense faux-liberal stroking in anticipation of the forthcoming
election season are probably on solid ground. The U-turn regarding
policy towards Cuba demonstrated recently on the editorial pages of
the New York Times also point to a strategic shift in the
thinking of key elements of the US ruling class.
● John
Pilger,
by way of Michael Munk's always interesting blog, lastmarx,
asks what became of Malaysian flight MH17,
which crashed in the Eastern Ukraine.
After the July disaster, the Western media proceeded to blame Eastern
Ukrainian resistance fighters and Russia without a shred of hard
evidence beyond “unnamed” Western intelligence “sources” (How
do journalists acquire access to intelligence sources yet remain
uncompromised?).
Despite
recovering black boxes, debris and bodies, the Western investigators
have been strangely silent since August. No evidence has come forth
apart from Russian sources. No indictments from the notorious
International Court of Justice (from which the US refused to honor its
jurisdiction in 1986 despite having a permanent judge and frequently
imposing jurisdiction on others). Compare this to the Western-induced
hysteria surrounding earlier incidents like Korean Airlines 007, a
media frenzy that demonized the Soviets for years. Even the crazed
General Breedlove-- Pilger calls him NATO's “Dr. Strangelove”--
has remained relatively silent. Could it be that the facts are
pointing the wrong way?
● The
2014 Brazen Hypocrisy award goes to President Barack Obama for his
two-faced appeal to the right of self defense. Esteemed Cuban blogger
Manuel
A. Yepe
lauds research by Brandon Turbeville that recovers a statement from
November 2012 by the self-righteous Peace Prize Winner. President
Obama, in defense of Israeli aggression, argued: “... there is no
country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its
citizens from outside its borders.” Of course this is unabashed
hypocrisy for a leader who daily signs off on drone, cruise missile,
and bomb attacks on Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, or Yemen, a
glaring contradiction that Yepe credits Turbeville for exposing.
Certainly
there are plenty of candidates for the Hypocrisy Award, most of whom
nest in US seats of power: the recent sanctions imposed by a serial
human rights violator (the US) against Venezuela for imaginary “human
rights” violations count as first degree hypocrisy. Imagine a
government that spies on ALL of its citizens, tortures foreigners,
and allows militarized police forces to kill unarmed citizens
punishing Venezuela and lecturing the rest of the world about good
behavior.
Or
consider the hypocrisy of ferreting out other countries deficient in
democracy-- a favorite activity of US media pundits-- while never
mentioning Japan, a country ruled by one party, the Liberal
Democratic Party, since 1955 with less than four years of respite.
Many of those dubbed “dictators” would be jealous.
And
then there's the shameless Henry Blodget, the blue-blood, consummate
Wall Street insider, who has been banned for life from the securities
industry for fraud. Addicted to the celebrity spotlight, Blodget
regarded the claim that the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea
hacked a US entertainment company as a sufficient basis for declaring
the alleged hack “effectively an act of war….” Blodget's panic arises
from his concerns that the DPRK might “get into the money”:
“'It’s not just they get some credit card numbers which we’ve
been seeing forever. But they actually get into the money' at large
corporations and banks” (Yahoo Finance, 12-19-14).
Truly,
we swim in a sea of hypocrisy.
● But
hypocrisy is only tolerated because we refuse to hold public figures
and the media accountable for their statements; as Gore Vidal put it,
we reside in the “United States of Amnesia.” He drew attention to
an adult population narcotized by shallow entertainments and denied
any sense of history or continuity. Actually, Martha Gellhorn said it
much earlier (1953) when she noted the “consensual amnesia”
rampant in the US.
It
is wrong, however, to blame the US people for the cowardice and lack
of accountability of the media and academia. We cannot blame
collective ignorance on the victims when it is the product of the
massive, suffocating machinery of capitalist disinformation and
vulgar culture.
Imagine
if we could hold all of the opinion makers and policy pundits
accountable for their slavish promotion of the unprovoked invasion of
Iraq and the subsequent destabilization of the entire Middle East.
Imagine if we could exile them to write for the Metropolis Daily
Planet until they reclaimed their integrity. Soon, we would forget
the names Friedman, Krauthammer, and the other cheerleaders of
imperialism, maybe even the loudmouth, Cheney. Exactly what
journalistic crimes must they commit, what disasters must they
endorse before their bosses and colleagues turn them out?
Similarly,
the economic collapse of 2007-2008, unpredicted and unsolved by the
“wise men” of the economics profession, has spawned no new
thinking or rejection of the old.
Sadly,
most of our public intellectuals have become courtiers and not truth
seekers.
● We
must not ignore the amnesia of the US left. Forgotten is the mass
euphoria over the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Virtually all of
the liberal and soft left was swept away by the overwhelming
Democratic Party victory, affording a two-year window to pass a whole
laundry list of legislation benefiting labor, minorities, women, the
elderly, undocumented and other components of the Democratic Party
coalition. Except for a health care initiative that has failed to
live up to anyone's expectations other than insurance companies, none
of these promises came to fruition, even to serious consideration. As the Democrats gin up for
another Presidential campaign behind Hillary (after she disposes of
the Quixote-like campaign of Elizabeth Warren), this miserable
performance will be forgotten. With the Obama well running dry,
liberal and the moderate left will drill a new Clinton well of hope.
Memories are short.
● While
the signs of mass militancy are positive, most recently from the
anger and activism springing from criminal police behavior, the left
seems to find diversions and distractions that create speed bumps, if
not detours, from clarity and united action.
The
energy of the Occupy movement was welcome, but the embrace of the
organizing principles of disorganization proved-- once again-- a
damper on movement building. Seemingly, every generation must
champion group therapy as an antidote to “hierarchies” and
“leadership,” alleged features of the “old left,” “the
establishment,” “elites” or other evils imagined by
self-anointed ideological gurus.
The
New Left of the sixties pioneered this posture, shattering enormous
mass movements against racism and war into a thousand pieces. The
shallow and idealistic emotions conjured by the words “participatory
democracy” arise again and again with the same result.
● The
latest obstacle to ideological clarity and effective action is the
amorphous and ideologically confounding “Sharing” Economy
movement. The “New” or “Sharing” economy projects occupy two
distinct poles.
At
one pole are the liberal/left activists who have been shocked by the
human carnage of economic crisis, but are afraid of or disillusioned
with the socialist option. While many may see capitalism's flaws,
they are cowed by the enormous task of defeating and replacing it.
Rather than joining Marxists, who are confident and determined to
revive the fight for a world without exploitation and without rule by
the rich and powerful, they propose that we simply drop out of the
global economy, that we live and work outside of it. In collectively
owned cooperatives, they propose an alternative to capitalism.
But is it really an alternative?
Certainly
there is nothing, in principle, wrong with cooperatives. Indeed, they
are sometimes an answer for small-holders to improve their destiny
against large capitalist enterprises. That is, they can postpone, but
rarely derail the laws of capitalist development, the tendency for
the large to devour the small.
But
it is silly to believe that cooperatives in any way challenge
capitalism as we know it today. State-monopoly capitalism-- the
merger of the power of the state with the largest, most economically
dominant corporations-- will not shudder in the face of the
cooperative movement. Nor should it. If cooperatives posed any kind
of threat, the mega-corporations would swat them like flies.
Instead,
the New Economy (cooperative) movement does offer an alternative-- an
alternative to small businesses. Cooperatives, where they exist,
compete against small businesses. They mesh a small-business
mentality with an immature social consciousness, a program that only
succeeds at the expense of those businesses marginally able to
survive while leaving the rich and powerful untouched.
At
best, the cooperative movement offers a safe haven for the few to
hone their entrepreneurial skills in commercial combat against some of
our potential allies in the anti-monopoly movement, the under-capitalized, marginal small business owner.
● The
other pole, however, is more insidious. The “sharing” economy, as
exemplified by Uber and other creatively named Google-era projects,
does not pretend to be anti-capitalist. While “sharing” poses as
a kinder, gentler, freer capitalism, it really counts as a way for a
new generation of entrepreneurs to pry open markets long dominated by
well ensconced services. At the same time, this well-educated,
supremely self-confident cabal have seduced many into believing that
predation on these service industries is somehow “progressive.”
In
fact, Uber and the sharing model are a step back to proto-capitalism, a return to the putting-out"system,
where providing the labor and resources is the responsibility of
others and not the capitalist. Uber, for example, uses the human
capital (drivers) and fixed capital (their cars) of its “employees”
to undermine services that are capital intensive (taxis, insurance,
benefits, maintenance, fuel, etc) and available to even the most
disadvantaged (subsidized public transportation). Like charter
schools and package-delivery services, they cherry-pick the most
profitable, least risky, or least costly niches of a service and
leave the rest for someone else (most often, the public sector). In
that way, they most resemble the hyper-exploitative cottage
industries of the pre-industrial era. Like those industries, they
rely upon sweated labor and forgo all worker protections.
Of
course not all those embracing the sharing model begin as predators.
Many see the internet as creating new opportunities for matching
people and services. But centuries of capitalism teach us that every
entrepreneur afforded the opportunity of matching people with
services has leaped at the opportunity to commercialize it. Elite
universities and business schools have not purged that tendency from
their students.
Whether
it is cooperatives or the “sharing” model of entrepreneurship,
those looking for answers to the rapaciousness and vulgarity of our
society must look elsewhere.
We
will come no closer to achieving social justice and democracy until
we understand the malignancy of capitalism. There are no other
diagnoses.
Zoltan
Zigedy
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