Imperialism, the Enemy of Peace

On February 2, I wrote: “Clearly, the Biden administration is fishing in troubled waters, exploiting unjustified fears of Russian aggression to advance narrow economic goals: natural gas sales and military-armament production and sales.” The point is that US behavior can be explained and is best explained as that of an imperialist superpower in the classic Leninist sense.

It was not concern for a fragile new democracy and human rights, nor was it resistance to autocratic power that motivated the US in the Ukraine crisis, as government officials and media in the US would have it.

Nor was it a misguided foreign policy or poor political choices exhibited by US leaders, as some liberal critics and center-left analysts would maintain.

Instead, the US was saber-rattling, fomenting discord, and war-mongering in the classic late-nineteenth century fashion chronicled by Lenin in his 1917 book, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Standing behind the high-minded, moralistic goals voiced by Biden, Blinken, and Nuland were the economic interests of the most powerful capitalist state. With his trumpeting of the war danger, Biden was carrying water for the US energy and military industrial sectors and guided by the imperatives of finance capital.

The “Western Marxists,” post-Marxists, and neo-Marxists that have seduced so many of the younger anti-capitalist activists in the West will recoil from this analysis, denouncing it as “reductionist,” reducing complex motives to simple, basic economic exploitation.

But US behavior is impossible to explain in any other way. US allies, with their own imperialist interests, have sought to defuse the US-generated crisis. As I wrote earlier, the Schönbach affair in Germany, resulting in the firing of the German Naval leader (explained in detail by Victor Grossman), along with the hectic diplomacy of France’s Macron, illustrate the depth of European resistance to Biden’s war baiting. They, along with Ukraine’s President, Zelensky, have sought to moderate Blinken and Nuland’s hysteria and slow the rush to war.

After Biden’s first formal meeting at the White House with Germany's new chancellor, Olaf Scholtz, on February 2, Biden could only enthuse that war would suspend the development of the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. He is quoted in The Wall Street Journal: “If Russia invades, that means tanks and troops crossing the border of Ukraine, again, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will put an end to it… I promise you we will be able to do it.”

Scholtz, on the other hand, would not link war with the pipeline’s fate. The shameless US media saw Scholtz’s response as a sign of his newness on the job!

Those who remain skeptical of the economic motives behind the US warmongering must explain why Biden placed natural gas politics ahead of any other matter before him and his German ally in this first significant policy exchange. Biden’s glee-- not shared by his German counterpart-- reveals the importance the US government places on seizing the natural gas market from the Russians, their rival in the energy business.

The Ukraine crisis presents other economic advantages as well. In less than two weeks, the US has sent eight cargo planes to the Ukraine with military supplies, part of the $200 million Biden authorized in new military aid. The xenophobic, ultra-nationalist Baltic states and Poland have sent massive amounts of military equipment to Ukraine as well, much of which is sourced from US corporations and will be replaced by aid or purchases from the US.

Whether Ukraine joins NATO or not, Ukraine is being militarized and will continue to be a destination for US arms. On this front, the US military-industrial establishment will win, regardless of the crisis outcome.

Adversaries on both sides of the Cold War-like divide will be armed to the teeth and the possibility of war raised accordingly.

Now that Afghanistan is gone as a source of demand for US military hardware, Biden’s team is looking for new conflicts to generate dollars for the misnamed “defense” industry and to prime the pump on a stagnating US economy.

The old term for the linkage between US economic performance and military spending is “military Keynesianism,” the idea that economic activity can be stimulated with unending, costly, and wasteful military contracts for exotic weapons and instantly obsolescent munitions. Since it's out of fashion to blame the swollen bi-partisan military budget for our ills (like inflation!), the floodgates for future military spending are now open.

In a recent op-ed piece, an academic and foreign policy think-tank heavyweight, who is well-situated in ruling class circles, Walter Russell Mead, makes the case for dramatically increasing military spending. Mead offers little or no compelling reasons for expanding military expenditures beyond the now conventional foes: Russia, the PRC, and Iran. Nonetheless, “America must again get serious about defense [sic] spending.”

Mead goes to great lengths to unfavorably compare the current share of GDP devoted to the military budget with that of past periods: the Cold War, the so-called War on Terror, the Reagan era, and even World War II. By these standards alone, we are not spending enough! A rather arbitrary and self-serving argument!

But that is just window dressing for Mead’s real purposes:

Increased defense spending wouldn’t be a drag on economic growth. The capacities America needs to add to its defense arsenal are mostly high-tech and have civilian as well as military applications. Just as Israel’s investments in cybersecurity and high-tech weaponry helped it become a startup nation with the most dynamic civilian economy in its history, a renewed commitment to national defense can increase the competitiveness of American industry while boosting national security [my emphasis].

So, behind the facade of national defense and serving America is the economic advantage that Mead sees from pouring hundreds of billions more into military spending.

The Ukraine crisis should underscore lessons about US foreign policy that the often disoriented US left should have long drawn from our history.

The US media functions like every other monopoly-dominated industry: driven by profits and expediency, while serviced by and serving the state. It’s trusted service to the state is rewarded with front-row seats in the state’s propaganda circus and full access to its ministers of misinformation.

CNN, a network swamped with turmoil and scandal, demonstrated the depths of state servility with a recent bizarre public scolding of Putin for his vulgarity in the gentlemanly and gentlewomanly diplomatic process-- an indulgence in triviality.

The Guardian, the supposed left flank of the mainstream media, expressed alarm over French President Macron’s energetic diplomatic initiative to de-escalate the crisis over Ukraine, accusing him of “freelancing” and expressing “his particular view of Russia as a European nation, and lofty talk of new security guarantees…” which “will have set alarm bells ringing” in the exclusive NATO club.

Both commentaries are all too fitting and predictable from a lapdog capitalist press.

It should also be obvious to opponents of war that this risk and all risks of conflict in the era of imperialism spring from the clash of imperial powers or the pressing of their interests on other nations. While the anti-war movement is and should be a big tent, it will be limited in its success if it fails to grasp this point. Moralistic arguments or appeals to the political parties committed to imperialism, like the US Democratic Party, will have little effect. The long established bi-partisanship of the two parties on foreign policy and aggression, except in periods of a severe crisis of policy like late in the Vietnam war, should shine the necessary light on that fact.

Further, a genuine left committed to building a mass anti-war movement must not link the fortunes of such a movement to the fortunes of pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist (they are the same thing!) political parties like the Democratic Party.

With the Democrats holding power, fear of disrupting their rule disables the effort to avert war, as it does today.




Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

A Foreign Policy Built on a Foundation of Lies

Cuba, a country with a population roughly the size of Paris, France, poses no threat to the United States, except in the minds of the deranged. Yet there is a remarkable number of “deranged” people populating the upper echelons of US government officialdom, the foreign policy academy, and the media.

Given that Cuba has a military largely armed with, at its best, late Soviet-era armaments, the idea of any military threat to the US is ludicrous.

Nor does Cuba have any binding mutual defense pact with any great power.

What Cuba does have is a citizenry organized and impassioned to defend the country’s integrity and independence.

So, we must conclude that the virulent hostility that the US government has shown since the revolution until today comes from tiny Cuba’s audacity, the audacity to insist upon its unflinching, uncompromising independence.

With a long and well documented history of obsessive US intervention in Cuban affairs-- from the ludicrous to the outrageous-- it should be clear that Cuba is a constantly irritating mote in its giant Northern neighbor’s eye.

From unending, James Bond-inspired assassination attempts on the revolution’s venerated leader, Fidel Castro Ruz, to criminal, false-flag operations jeopardizing, even potentially taking the lives of US citizens, as proposed by the US military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (Operation Northwoods), the US has shown no restraint in seeking to remove that mote.

With very few exceptions, the US ruling class has been united and unabashed in its demented determination to overthrow the Cuban government. Well over half a century of a cruel, inhuman economic blockade attests to the perfidy of the US government, its office holders, and apologists.

When called out by public UN resolutions condemning the illegal blockade, most US allies vote against it; yet, none dare defy the US and break it-- a shameful, disgusting stain on their cowardly leaders of every conventional political persuasion.

When we think that US policymakers have reached the limits of insane depravity toward Cuba, they reach beyond that limit. In 2017, the US government concocted the “Havana Syndrome,” a mysterious Flash Gordon-like death ray that Cuba uses to incapacitate only those who represent US interests, leaving others untouched.

While this absurd claim should evoke some doubts from even the most gullible, the US (and European) media pounced on the story like it was bloody red meat.

Even after headaches, dizziness, and anxiety “struck” stalwart US officials in such diverse and seemingly unrelated places as Peoples’ China, Russia, Taiwan, Austria, Poland, Georgia, Russia, Serbia, Colombia, Vietnam, Geneva, and Paris, the media and the State Department saw a deep conspiracy. A support group, Advocacy for Victims of Havana Syndrome was founded. A Helping American Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks Act was passed by our caring Congress and signed by President Biden in October.

For over five years of relentless fear-mongering, we have been led to believe that Cuba and possibly her malicious friends are in possession of a powerful new weapon that could distress the heroic efforts of US agents of imperialism.

But now we are told by a no-less-authoritative source than the Central Intelligence Agency that the “Havana Syndrome” was not likely caused by US foes. Quoting the noticeably disappointed Wall Street Journal, “Instead, the agency concluded that other medical conditions, stress or unexplained factors could be behind the ailments…”

Another fable of imperialism exposed, yet the fantasy will persist.

******

The same hysteria purveyors who have for decades abused tiny Cuba with serial lies are now turning their attention on giant Peoples’ China (PRC). 

Recognizing that the PRC is today an economic rival and a relatively independent force with a significant military and its own foreign policy, the guardians of the empire have focused their security scrutiny on those of Chinese descent who are working and living in the US. One such unfortunate person, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and former head of his department, was arrested and accused of lying on an application for a US Department of Energy grant in 2017.

Gang Chen was charged in January, 2021 with failing to reveal information required on his Energy Department grant application and failing to report money received from Chinese institutions ($19 million!).

The problem with the FBI’s investigation and their xenophobic dragnet was that Professor Chen’s Energy Department application did NOT require him reveal the information allegedly withheld. Furthermore, the money allegedly received by Chen was in actuality a GRANT awarded to MIT from the PRC’s Southern University of Science and Technology.

Chen’s tragic story is part of a 2018 “China Initiative” undertaken by the US Department of Justice to ferret out spies, saboteurs, and other nefarious agents of People’s China bent on taking unfair advantage of the US, its research facilities, and universities. Implicit in the initiative is the understanding that the PRC is catching or overtaking the US in technological innovation, explicitly 5G networks. Thus was born a racist and nationalistic witch hunt of academics, students, and researchers of Chinese ethnicity.

Thousands have been investigated, with few convictions but lots of disrupted lives, discredited careers, and an experience “traumatic and deeply disillusioning” in the words of the exonerated Gang Chen. The US is finally dropping the charges after a year of public pillorying.

The unwarranted harassment of both Chinese Americans and Chinese nationals mirrors the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s and the accompanying illegalities committed by the FBI, all in the service of bolstering a rabid anti-PRC foreign policy.

After five years of scandalizing Cuba’s good name and nearly four years of demonizing Chinese and Chinese American academics, US officials have recognized their folly. Of course, irreparable damage has been done.

******

To read the universally compliant US capitalist media, Russia has amassed 100,000 troops on the border of Ukraine and is waiting for the moment-- frozen turf, a false-flag operation, an inadequate US response, a provocation, etc.-- to cross the border and march on Kyiv. The figure of 100,000 appears constantly without even a cautious media challenge. Where does the number come from? What does it mean?

Russian intentions are never questioned by US talking heads. “Putin is evil” replaces serious analysis.

Russian interests in the confrontation are never explained. The betrayal of US, Western, and NATO promises to refrain from eastern expansion go unmentioned or derided. And aggressive moves by the Eastern European extreme nationalists-- Poland and the Baltic states-- are whitewashed as defensive.

The entire establishment-- politicians, academics, think-tankers, NGO directors, newspaper editors and their toadies, celebrities, etc.-- are united in predicting an imminent invasion of Ukraine by Russian hordes. All march in step with the State Department press releases crafted by the Russia-haters, Blinken and Nuland.

The feverish campaign reached its most absurd moment with the phone call from US President Biden to Ukraine President Zelensky warning of a fast-approaching barbarian invasion and the “sacking” of Kyiv. The next day, Zelensky asked the Western press to report Ukrainian calm and to tone down the imminent-war rhetoric.

Few in the West have noticed the President and State Department’s inconsistency. On the one hand, they project an Eastern European apocalypse and on the other hand, they propose no serious military deterrent on the part of the US or NATO. Instead, Biden’s administration harps on Trump-like sanctions aimed at the Russian economy and, not least of all, its energy sector.

If oil was a motivating factor in US foreign policy activism in the 1980s and 1990s, then natural gas is a decisive motivating factor today. Where the US was determined to secure oil resources in the past, energy independence and the fracking revolution motivate US policy makers to secure natural gas markets today.

In essence, the US is baiting the Russians into actions that will encourage the Europeans to reject their dependence upon cheap Russian natural gas. Instead, they want Europe to rely on expensive US liquified natural gas, a change that Europeans have, so far, resisted. War hysteria is meant to frighten the Europeans into rejecting the nearly completed Nord Stream pipeline and, instead, build costly liquified natural gas terminals to accept US gas. Thus, the underlying strategy is economic-- a not-so-subtle bullying of Europe into aligning with US economic interests.

The goal is to restart the botched, overinvested, badly managed fracking revolution that would now ride the tide of high energy prices.

The French and German leadership understand this gambit and have tactfully urged negotiation. The Germans, in particular, recognize the dangerous consequences for their economy. Their recent commitment to move away from nuclear energy and coal, leave their export-driven industries vulnerable to natural gas prices.

While visiting an Indian think tank, the German naval chief, Schönbach, recently spoke candidly of the confrontation in Eastern Europe, urging discussion and “respect” for President Putin. Though a voice of moderation and, no doubt, reflecting a broad section of European opinion, NATO hardliners forced his resignation.

Clearly, the Biden administration is fishing in troubled waters, exploiting unjustified fears of Russian aggression to advance narrow economic goals: natural gas sales and military-armament production and sales. Unfortunately, the dangers of violent confrontation are only multiplied by the boot-licking of many European leaders and the media. Much hinges on how the Russians weigh their options. They, too, have narrow interests, opportunists, and warmongers.

All wars based on lies end tragically.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Reading the Economic Tea Leaves

Imagine a car careening around dark mountain roads during a rainstorm. The driver has no speedometer, but a set of brakes and plenty of power available at the accelerator. The passengers have both a need to get to their destination and an abiding concern for their own safety. They want to arrive promptly, but safely.

This story is a simple metaphor for the situation facing the US economy today. The dangerous roads represent the precarious state of the US economy still in disrepair in the aftermath of the 2007-9 systemic meltdown and suffering the devastation wreaked by the extra-systemic pandemic a decade or so later. The conjunction of these two unexpected disasters make the road ahead uncertain.

The lack of a speedometer represents the modern absence of any objective, material, universally accepted measure of value. In the past, the convention of measuring value by some rare metal like gold or silver would anchor the circulation of money and credit in something beyond the judgment or interests of central bankers or treasury officials who can set the “speed” of currency by fiat. But not today.

In the US, officials-- our economic “drivers” --have been pressing hard on the accelerator: buying up US debt and mortgage debt so that their growth will not devalue existing assets. In fact, their actions have more than met the challenge of devaluation-- asset deflation-- left by the 2007-9 crisis; they are now pumping up financial, home, and other asset values to new, seemingly limitless heights.

The “drivers” have suppressed interest rates which makes the cost of borrowing virtually zero, allowing corporations to access easy money for mergers, acquisitions, and stock buy-backs, further swelling asset values without touching corporate earnings.

Finding that pressing the accelerator on dangerous roads has not resulted in a crash, the emboldened bankers and policymakers have been pushing even harder, producing inflated values of assets and profits, while debt remains fixed and with little associated costs. Ruling elites and corporate executives fully support and reward these policies.

Thus was created a policymaker’s utopia: a limitless stimulus to the capitalist economy with no associated danger. Ruling class policy makers drink the same magic elixir that many on the left have urged: Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), the notion that fiat currency (currency free of any basis in a common material standard) allows currency expansion without any necessarily negative consequences. But they have hitched it to the interests of wealth and power. While US economic czars will not admit it, they have quietly tossed out their faith in the infamous Phillips curve, the close relationship of government spending and inflation, budget balancing and fiscal restraint.

Once, when Keynesian demand-side economics was popular, many policy makers also took to hiding this once-universal consensus for political reasons. Just as many read Keynes as justifying welfare spending and public-sector investment, ruling-class apologists insisted that “pumping up” the economy (bourgeois economics floats on metaphors) would result in massive inflation and crisis, while contradictorily endorsing obscene military spending and massive corporate subsidies and bailouts to do their “pump priming”!

Similarly, today’s elite policymakers mask their commitment to MMT remedies behind bluster about budget deficits and pay-as-you-go: they urge austerity, while government and quasi-government institutions spend money like drunken sailors, scarfing up assets and locking them up on their balance sheets in order to evade a deflationary crisis and to promote the stock market’s wild ride.

The limitless utopia imagined by US policymakers resulted in the Federal Reserve accumulating $8.76 trillion in assets by December 29, 2021, nearly $6 trillion of which they acquired since 2013. Had the assets (Treasury securities and mortgage securities) remained in the marketplace, the value of ALL securities would have dropped dramatically and the yield necessary to entice buyers would have risen sharply, discouraging future borrowing and retarding economic growth.

Instead, the Federal Reserve engaged in a massive inflation of financial assets to fend off the deflationary pressures inherited from the 2007-9 catastrophe, presenting investors and bankers with the gift that kept on giving: perpetual asset inflation and an assurance that the Fed would always have their back.

But eventually, the driver of a speeding car or those steering the US economy run into a sharp curve in the road and realize that they must slow down.

For the US economy, that curve in the road is consumer inflation. It is a misconception to see inflation as only arising in 2021. The first signs of fast-rising consumer inflation were indeed in 2021, but artificially induced asset inflation had preceded this for nearly a decade. Indeed, it was this asset inflation in conjunction with the shock of a collapse in supply brought on by pandemic lockdown and an even more dramatic rebound in demand that spurred the consumer inflation that now plagues the US economy.

How the masters of the economic universe thought that they could perpetually spur financial asset inflation without inducing inflation in more mundane, real-world markets-- autos, bacon, and eggs-- is truly astounding and hubristic. Most of us have the sense to slow down for the curves in the road.

******

Inflation will be with us for a while. Despite their initial Pollyanna assurances of a temporary inflationary blip, most of our economic gurus have come around to acknowledge that inflation has considerable staying power. The December year-to-year consumer price index (CPI) accelerated to 7% from November’s 6.8%, with December’s CPI constituting the biggest increase since June 1982.

Core producer-prices leaped a stunning 8.3%, the fastest on record, according to The Wall Street Journal, an ugly foretell of future consumer prices.

As I noted in late November, inflation is, ironically, itself like a virus, intensifying and spreading far and wide. Enterprises and institutions scramble to catch up to price increases with further price increases. Monopoly capitalism seizes on this opportunity to increase profit margins well beyond any catching-up level and driving inflation ever further. Small businesses and labor unions lag behind inflation, while the monopolies push it forward. It is the mega-firms, the giant monopolies, and not Labor or small business, that push the inflation spiral to greater and greater heights.

As they have in past inflationary periods, officialdom-- awakened to the danger-- are now set to “put the brakes” on the economy. Through raising interest rates and discontinuing buying securities, even selling off some locked in the Federal Reserve, they hope to slow down the economy. Of course, this “braking” will also slow down the tepid recovery from the earlier lockdown in response to the Covid pandemic.

Though clearly prescribed by the accelerating inflation, the slowdown could not come at a worse time. Nearly all of the retail and manufacturing figures for December 2021 were already trending down long before any Federal Reserve or Treasury braking was to occur. Total retail and food service sales dropped 1.9% from November, led by an 8.7% drop in online stores and 7% drop in department stores. Industrial production fell, with manufacturing down .3% from the previous month.

Fourth quarter 2021 reports also showed a significant drop in profits for two of the largest US banks, a departure from the unprecedented profit growth of the financial sector during the pandemic, an omen of pressure on profitability that will undoubtedly affect prices and interest rates.

******

What will inflation, higher interest rates, and slowing growth (In January, The World Bank revised its global growth estimate downward by roughly 25%) mean for 2022?

For some time, obscenely growing profits and nearly free money have generated an intense search for yield, as they did in the lead-up to the recession of 2000 and the 2007-9 crash. The growth of “blank check” companies, special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) and the surging of “unicorns” (privately-owned start-ups valued at over a billion dollars) places a lot of capital in a risky environment of slowing economic growth, rising costs, and higher financial costs. Even before the slowing economy and high inflation, start-ups were struggling. When investors, swollen with funds, seek out these dark, less regulated areas of economic activity in search of higher yields, trouble is often on the horizon. At the end of 2021, two thirds of initial public offerings (IPOs) traded below their opening price, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Rising interest rates may also endanger the mortgage/home-buying bubble, a phenomenon that has seen home prices soar at near-record paces, thanks to low-interest loans. Those pundits who derided the Chinese Communist Party’s pre-emptive strike on its own wildly anarchic residential construction boom may live to eat their words as the US home-buying spree unwinds.

With low union density, 2022 will likely see a loss in relative income of workers to inflation. A slowing economy and a squeeze on corporate profits will bring an increase in labor exploitation, more unemployment and more intense working conditions.

At best, we face a revisiting of the stagflation of the 1970s. At worst, a deflationary overshoot-- a deep recession like the early years of the Reagan administration.

How will we respond?

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com.

Fighting Covid Together

It is often said that “the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members,” a quote attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. Nothing has brought that measure to the forefront like the two years of the Coronavirus pandemic.

In an unusual circumstance, a catastrophe borne by all simultaneously tests every country’s healthcare system, every country’s ability to respond effectively to an unexpected challenge.

The Coronavirus punishes those countries that lack a commitment to preparedness, execution, and relief. It inflicts great pain on those societies that tolerate or encourage inequality. It ravages the populations that stress individualism or individual responsibility over collectivism and social responsibility. 

Universal, publicly funded, publicly guaranteed, and publicly administered health solutions fare far better than private, semi-private, or public-private schemes.

The bastion of private solutions, “efficiency,” and individual responsibility-- the US-- wins the failed-approach-with-the-most-deadly-consequences competition hands down, besting all countries in late, insufficient, and botched response. 

Conventional wisdom among the television gasbags was that the US catastrophe was the fault of the arrogant, ignorant President Trump. But now with another year of record-setting infections and deaths under the Biden Administration, that explanation falls away. The problem is systemic, though no one in the US political industry will acknowledge that it is inherent to the US healthcare model.

The facts are incontrovertible: On Thursday, December 30 Worldometer confirmed US infections totaled 572,029 for the day– a new record– and 1584 deaths on the same day. More infections occurred in the US than any other country for that day and for the duration of the pandemic to date (55,252,823). More deaths (846,189) have been reported in the US due to Covid than any other country. Happy New Year!

Far more deaths have happened from the Covid infection than combat deaths in all the wars fought by the US since 1775. This singular “achievement” has been accomplished in only two years. There are no cries of “USA, USA!”, as were in other cases of US pride.

Other countries that follow the US model showed similar “victories” in the Covid wars. Poland, a US ally engaging a similar employer-based, private insurance system, incurred 14,319 new cases and 710 deaths on December 30. Another country, Colombia, a US ally incorporating private insurance and individual responsibility in its healthcare system, has amassed 5,147,039 total cases and 129,901 deaths. 

Compare these numbers to countries that have a robust public health sector, with a focus on identification, isolation, contact tracing, and selective, but thorough lockdowns. Unlike the US and its allies who rely upon individual responsibility, some countries have robust public health systems and a deep-seated identification with and duty to others.

China (PRC), for example, despite being the most populous country in the world, had 4636 new cases on December 30 and no deaths. In total, PRC has far fewer total deaths from Covid than the US has in a week. Japan has fewer total deaths than the US has in a month. And Taiwan has far fewer total deaths than the US has in a day.

A poor country like Nicaragua, limited by US sanctions, has only 17,487 total cases and 212 deaths through December 30, 2021.

All share a reliance upon a public healthcare approach, renouncing a dependence solely on vaccines and individual choices. They all approach the terror of Covid as a social issue not to be solved by private, profit-driven solutions and a state leaving the key decisions to individuals and their own self-interest. Instead, they call on the people’s highest values-- cooperation.

Heroic Cuba has mounted a national campaign against Covid, despite the barbarous blockade and scarce resources, developing its own domestically developed vaccines and offering them to other countries.

While these approaches embody what might be called “socialist values,” they need not be limited to socialist-oriented countries, as Japan and Taiwan demonstrate. An effective war against Covid can be waged by countries that embrace a healthcare system that cleanses private profit from the task of protecting public health and ensuring equal, universal benefits. 

In other words, an effective approach to Covid can be reached as a reform under capitalism, but not without a radical shift in the political landscape away from the notion that the private sector has all of the answers. Only lacking is the political will.

Yet there are compelling reasons to go further than healthcare reform. The pharmaceutical industry has a stranglehold over the efforts to win the war against Covid. Pfizer and Moderna have made over $35 billion in vaccine sales for the first nine months of 2021 and are projected to sell more than $52 billion in 2022, according to The Wall Street Journal. The same article, documents the “high stakes legal battle [that] is taking shape over lucrative patent rights for Covid-19 vaccines, with drug companies pitted against each other and government and academic scientists over who invented what.”

As is typical with drug research, public institutions and scientists research, develop, often do everything short of manufacture and market new drugs, while big pharma acquires patents or licenses to sell. “Patents are especially valuable in the pharmaceutical industry because they can give a company the exclusive right to sell a drug or vaccine for many years, free from generic competition.” Academic and government scientists sell licenses for a pittance and pharmaceuticals exercise the monopoly price-gouging all too familiar to anyone utilizing the US healthcare system.

In the matter of the Covid vaccine development, the role of government scientists and the National Institute of Health is being disputed by the drug companies. One expert claims that with the dispute, “tens of billions of dollars are on the line.” In a separate case, “Moderna could be on the hook to pay more than $1 billion to the government for infringing the patent.”

At a time when people are asked to risk their lives, to sacrifice in the battle against Covid, big pharma is carving the vaccine’s destiny to fit its profit model, extracting the last dollars from the vaccine’s development process, denying its partner, the US government, even a token.

As reported by Common Dreams, a group of Texas researchers have pointed the way ahead by developing and offering an open-source alternative to the corporate vaccines. “We're not trying to make money,” Peter Hotez, who led the Texas Children's Hospital team, told The Washington Post. “We just want to see people get vaccinated.” Implicit in his statement is a ringing indictment of the big pharma approach.

With US politicians clearly unwilling to rein in or reform the rapacious, big-donor pharmaceutical industry, it is time the people insist that it be nationalized. Since it cannot be tamed, it must be euthanized. Public ownership!

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

The ‘Democracy’ Wars

As part of the new Cold War orchestrated consensually by leaders of the two US political parties, a battle over democracy has emerged.

Aligned on one side are a group of bogus-independent, non-profit organizations like Freedom House (90% US government funded 2017), V-Dem Institute (funded by various governments, World Bank), Polity Data Series (funded by the CIA until 2020) that purport to rank and score nations on their level or degree of democratic governance. Not surprisingly, the countries that are aligned with their sponsors score high on democracy, while those who rival or conflict with their sponsors show poorly.

Despite these glaring conflicts of interest and transparent biases, scholars and pundits throughout the Atlantic alliance uncritically cite these results, thereby readily enlisting in the new Cold War encouraged by Western political elites.

Arrayed on the other side are those countries designated as foes of democracy-- The People’s Republic of China (PRC), The Russian Federation (Russia), The Islamic Republic of Iran (Iran), The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (Venezuela), The Republic of Nicaragua (Nicaragua), (The Republic of Cuba) Cuba and others-- all of which proclaim their commitment to equal or greater democracy than their Western counterparts. 

The war over democracy escalated with the Biden administration calling for a “Summit for Democracy” on December 8-10. Foregoing any pretense of dialogue, the US State Department refused invitations to those countries on its hit list, turning the event into an orgy of self-congratulation and a rebuke of those falling short of US ideals. Other countries like Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, Colombia, and India, noted for their retreat from democratic norms, were welcomed with open arms. 

At the same time, the mainstream media, including The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, are bemoaning the “backsliding,” “decline,” or “weakening” of US democracy. Establishment pundits express alarm over the Trump-turn in US politics, the increasing hostility between the two parties’ partisans, and charges and countercharges of electoral corruption.

Yet, they are oddly tolerant of the decisive role of money in “democratic” deliberation and the corrosive influence of corporate power, two anti-democratic trends that persistently worsen with the growth of economic inequality and profoundly undermine democracy. 

*****

Quoting R. Williams, Brian S. Roper in The History of Democracy makes this salient point: “Democracy ‘is a very old word… It came into English in the sixteenth century from a translation of demokratia, Greek, from the root words demos-- people, and kratos-- rule. It is at once evident from Greek use that everything depends on the senses given to people and to rule’” (page 1).

It has taken hundreds of years for capitalist ruling classes to concede that “demos” means all of the people and not merely “white males of substance.” In the US, that awakening only became nominally universal with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, enacted fifty-six years ago as a response to a determined peoples’ movement.

As for kratos, there have been many models of democratic rule since the early Dutch, US, and French Republics, models that allow for power-sharing monarchies, socialist democracy, constitutions, multiple parties, direct and indirect elections, short or long electoral terms, single or multiple houses of congress or parliament, various vote-counting and weighing schemes, and a host of other wrinkles that democratic theorists have devised.

From even a casual glance at history, it should be, therefore, clear that who constitutes the people and what constitutes governance or rule are highly contested. Nevertheless, history does demonstrate that social movements have forced further democratization upon existing ruling classes. In general, there has been a trend towards an expanding demos and a more diverse kratos.

This suggests that perhaps it is more useful to view democracy as a process, rather than a categorical state-of-affairs, a fixed political achievement. 

Countries become more democratic or less democratic in the same way as they become more just or less just. Like justice, democracy is not a success-term, but a relation, a measure of the direction of change, a constantly moving target. For an illustrative example, consider a newly liberated former colony that is certainly more democratic than its previously dominated status regardless of the kind of political institutions that it chooses. Surely, this makes more sense of democracy than the idealized model celebrated in Western patriotic grammar school textbooks.

It is the height of arrogance for Western ideologues to insist that some countries have crossed a supposed line separating enlightened democrats from “authoritarian” pagans. Democracy is a process and not a merit badge. 

For nation-states, “democratization” should be the watchword, the never-ending process that places more and more decisions in the hands of more and more people. From this perspective, popular revolutions would count as the most democratizing process of all, liberating masses from elite oppression and imposing the rule of the majority over the former rule of a minority.

*****

The era of the great bourgeois revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-- the Dutch, English, and French risings-- were clearly and unmistakably a time of great democratization with the liberation of masses of people from feudal constraints and/or absolutist rule (the US revolution ill-fits this pattern). The new ruling classes created new procedures and institutions to guarantee both that the gains were secured and that no new challenges to the new rule would arise. They were far from completing the democratic project.

The heralded and high-minded constitutions of the period (including the US constitution) created new institutions-- parliaments, congresses, executives, etc.-- and procedures-- lawmaking, rights construction, voting regulations, etc.-- that were believed by their creators to be constitutive of democracy.

 In other words, the various “founding founders” thought they had captured the essence of democracy in a set of rules for its continued implementation, as if democratization was completed with declarations and constitutive documents.  

What the bourgeois revolutionaries failed to understand was that procedural democracy-- a worthy product at the ascendency of the bourgeoisie-- was a great achievement, but one not adequate for all times or adequate for the continued march of democratization under changing conditions. Bourgeois democracy certainly expanded the participation of the masses (and assured the dominance of the bourgeoisie as a class!), yet it too often failed to guarantee rule for the people.

In discussions of democracy, the distinction between rule by the people and rule for the people is too often overlooked or conflated. There is no reason to presume that a system constructed to establish rule by the people will necessarily produce rule for the people. Cynics can readily manipulate well-meant institutions from benefitting the people. Fair rules do not guarantee just outcomes.

There is every reason to believe that, in a class society, the best of procedural democracies will not rule in ways that favor all or even most of the people. Nowhere in the constitutions of the bourgeois democracies will be found the recognition of the existence of social classes and the question of their relationship to democracy or democratization.

Certainly, the history of the US two-party system for all of this century, last century, and beyond has seen the government generally favor the interests of a small minority of the wealthy and powerful over the interests of the majority of working people. Others can argue whether the procedures established by the supposedly all-wise “founding fathers” is the most perfect example of how a democracy should be organized. But shouldn’t its failure to rule for the people count against its democratic content? How democratic can a “democracy” be if it fails to serve the interests of the people that it rules?

The stunning growth of economic inequality-- itself a constant in the Western “democracies” --- surely demonstrates a failure to measure up to the performance test of a purported democracy: are the people better off than with any alternative political arrangement besides bourgeois democracy? 

Opinion poll after opinion poll show that the majority of the people-- the supposed beneficiaries of democracy-- want guarantees of housing, jobs, health care, education, safety, etc., guarantees that Western 'democracies' consistently fail to deliver. 

Detaching a concept of democracy from the wellbeing or interests of the people knows no greater cynicism. Democracy without a connection to the interests of the majority is faux-democracy, a mere parlor game.

Obsession with the form of democracy-- the obsession fostered by capitalist leaders-- blinds far too many to the importance and centrality of the content of democracy, a distinction too often overlooked in the conversation over democratic governance.

Democratic form that fails to deliver for the majority of the people is a mere empty shell, as the current US “democracy” demonstrates.

*****

In the ‘democracy’ wars, The People’s Republic of China is now clearly in the sights of many in the developed capitalist countries, especially the US. The rise of PRC economic power, its rivalry with US influence in the world, and PRC’s independent stance in global politics has increased the enmity of the US and its allies to the point of a new Cold War.

Like the old Cold War with the Soviet Union, PRC’s enemies focus on the fact that the PRC is a “one-party” state. That is, the Communist Party takes a leading role and the deliberative organs are not organized around two or more parties. Instead, the operative councils and parliament are non-partisan, composed of both Communists and non-Communists.

Ironically, most of the founders of the heralded Western 'democracies' never envisioned, nor wanted parties or factions; yet multiple parties have become a litmus test for democracy in the eyes of the Atlantic alliance watchdogs. Indeed, these same watchdogs have since raised the bar again to deny democratic governance exists among several countries that have party systems and robust elections. They are said to have 'authoritarian' tendencies, a slippery idea coined to obscure, rather than shed light on the democracy debate.

The People’s Republic of China has responded to the ‘democracy’ wars with a report entitled Pursuing Common Values of Humanity -- China's Approach to Democracy, Freedom and Human Rights, written by New China Research (NCR), affiliated with the Xinhua News Agency. The 88 page document is a comprehensive argument for the democratic content of PRC governance. While the report develops a number of provocative, fresh ideas, it has received no more than superficial note in the monopoly media, an indication of the deeply dogmatic prejudice of Western commentators.

The NCR report quotes PRC leader Xi on bourgeois democracy: “If the people are awakened only at the time of voting but go dormant soon after, if they listen to slogans at the time of the election but have no say after the election, or if they are favored at the time of canvassing but are left out in the cold after the election, such a democracy is not a true democracy.”

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) argues for a new type of democracy that it calls “whole-process democracy,” a democracy that “pursues the unification of process and results-based democracy, procedural and substantive democracy, direct democracy and indirect democracy, as well as people’s democracy and state will.” The CCP counter poses whole-process democracy to “democracy for the few,” “one-time democracy,” and “pseudo-universal democracy.”

To my mind, “Whole-process democracy” is not rendered a completely transparent concept by this report-- some formulations remain vague. Others can judge for themselves, but the document and the accompanying ideas are surely worthy of careful study.

It should be evident nonetheless that the CCP recognizes that the test of democracy is how well it delivers for the people, that robust democracy must be more than procedural, that it must be substantial (results-oriented), as well. 

To bolster the claim that the test of democracy is fidelity to the interests of the people-- substantial, material democracy-- and that People’s China meets that test, the NCR cites a Harvard Ash Center study by Cunningham, Saich, and Turiel that shows trust of the population in the Communist Party of China has exceeded 90 percent for over a decade. 

In May of 2020, I cited a similar study, the Edelman Trust Barometer, that placed the PRC at the top of the list of 26 countries surveyed in terms of popular trust (the US, Germany, France, UK, Australia, Spain, Japan, and Russia all fell into the “distrust” bottom of the survey). So much for the "rule by the people" in the heralded capitalist countries.

How do Western political theorists reconcile their consistently negative portrayal of Chinese democracy with the high level of trust held by the people of the PRC in their governance?

By simply ignoring it.

A deeper, less smug discussion of democracy might be a good antidote to Western conceit in the ‘democracy’ wars.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com 

Nine into Two: The Failure of the US Two-Party System

When the so-called “Founding Fathers”-- the elites who constructed the US republic-- unfolded their unique vision of republicanism and political decision-making, they went long on stability and continuity and short on broad participation and social change.

Accordingly, most of them opposed political factions or parties, but very soon after the new government came into existence, major differences arose, leading to factions and swiftly into parties.

Predictably, the break in unanimity came with the formation of two parties, in the US, a Federalist and an anti-Federalist party.

But what is truly remarkable is that subsequent political differences in the US have been contained by only two parties for over two centuries. In most countries that embrace a parliamentary system, political parties emerge with the development of social classes and distinctive social strata. 

Further, as social classes generate internal differences, they too spawn new parties. In addition, religious, regional, and economic differences have generated distinctive political parties.

This is the pattern that exists throughout the advanced capitalist countries, creating multi-party parliaments as a commonplace. But not in the US.

Where there have been emergent third or fourth parties, the two parties have either placed insurmountable obstacles in their way or absorbed their political identity.

Stunted class consciousness, illusions of social mobility, perceived opportunities afforded by an expanding frontier, and entrenched loyalties are among the many factors securing a two-party system. The distractions of wars and conflicts, demanding unity and stability, have also played a role in preserving the two-party system.

In truth, the US ruling class has won a remarkable achievement in maintaining an electoral vessel filled to overflowing with diverse, incompatible interests. When will that vessel fracture?

A Pew Research Center study enlisting over 10,000 respondents in a political typology study, the most robust of those conducted by Pew since 1987 suggests a possible answer. What they found bears directly upon the validity and viability of the-two party system. In the words of the study, “...the gulf that separates Republicans and Democrats sometimes obscures the divisions and diversity of views that exist within both partisan coalitions – and the fact that many Americans do not fit easily into either one.”

Researchers found clusters of political attitudes that define independent voter perspectives that are hard to coexist comfortably in the two existing parties. They identify the following clusters and their respective percentages of the population:



It should be noted that these clusters are constructed from answers to questions that were posed to those participating in the survey. Thus, they are biased by the researchers' preconceived notions of the issues that they believe divide the US. Nonetheless,they do identify potential factions that coexist uneasily in both parties.

So we find that Pew identifies eight significant factions-- four that tend to vote Democratic and four that vote Republican (with stressed sideliners representing disinterested, disgusted, less frequent voters)-- funneling their votes into two electoral vehicles that cannot possibly represent them all adequately!

Moreover, the conventional illusion that each of the two parties represent a consistent, shared ideology obscures the many possibilities of creating useful coalitions or alliances in moving politics out of the stagnation and ineffectiveness of the US system.

Just to mention one of the insights to be drawn from the Pew study: [Members of the] "...Populist Right hold highly restrictive views about immigration policy and are very critical of government. But, in contrast to other parts of the GOP coalition, their criticism extends well beyond government to views of big business and to the economic system as a whole: 82% say that large corporations are having a negative impact on the way things are going in the country, and nearly half support higher taxes on the wealthy and on large corporations." In addition, more than any other group, they believe that they have been left behind. They also share with the left, the view that profits are too high.

While they share many left views that might be the basis for a tentative or calculated alliance with left forces, any such approach has been hysterically denounced by the liberal media, political purists, and smug elitists as consorting with evil, those who Hilary Clinton famously called "the deplorables".

If we were to burrow even deeper than the Pew topology and examine class differences-- and even more tellingly, various class ideologies-- it would become apparent that the two-party framework would fail abysmally in giving voice to the broad spectrum of political opinion characteristic of a modern, advanced capitalist state. In that regard, the two-party framework is a hindrance to democracy and neither a vehicle for nor exemplar of democratic decision-making.

Apart from its failure to capture ideological diversity, the two-party system encourages conformity on issues that are easily susceptible to patriotic or nationalistic zeolatry-- foreign policy, the military, loyalty, etc. Politicians in a two-party system dare not allow the other party to challenge them on these matters.

Consequently, we have two-party conformity on the “evils” of such diverse nations as Russia, PRC, Iran, DPRK, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Syria, and others, who share only one common feature-- they are made a target by our two-party dominated government. 

Nor do politicians of each party dare to question the glory or budgets of the military, the FBI, the CIA, etc. for fear that they will be called out by zealots in the other party-- again, a demonstration of the surfeit of democratic debate in a two-party parliamentary system.

Pepsi or Coke, Yankees or Blue Jays, ketchup or mustard are frivolous, but harmless choices. Democrat or Republican-- in the crises before us-- too often becomes frivolous as well, but increasingly harmful.

Unfortunately, too many people have invested heavily in their respective parties, succumbing again to empty, cynical promises like Obama’s risible “hope and change” slogan in our day. No amount of disappointment can seemingly separate the act of faith that cements voters to the two-parties. The prior investment in the Democratic and Republican parties generates what economists call the “sunk cost fallacy”, the idea that too much has been expended on the respective parties to jettison them now.

But it is a fallacy and until we learn to break away from the irrationality of the two-party charade, the Democratic Party will be an obstacle to the kind of changes that we desperately need to make.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com