Ruling Class Angst

There is a profound difference between the economic crisis of 2007-2009 and the evolving crisis of 2022. In 2007, capitalists feared the collapse of their own enterprises, but they had no doubt that the system was salvageable, albeit at costs that might prove difficult to impose. They knew that if the politicians could be won over to endorsing Wall Street’s prescriptions, if the people kept their pitchforks tucked away, and if the capitalists, in their greed, could be kept from devouring each other, then there was a good chance that an elite economic version of an “EMS” rescue team could save capitalism from further decline. Sure, the executives at Lehman Brothers, Bank of America, AIG, and many other firms had every right to fear for the future of their companies. But few capitalists imagined an existential threat to the system; few failed to believe in a way out.

This time is different.

Stagflation is a different kind of beast and that beast has the bourgeoisie, its friends, and its hangers-on terrified. The problem is that economic “science,” as they know it, only offers one possible escape and it has dire economic and political consequences. Once they recognized that inflation was not simply a momentary speed bump (as I predicted nearly a year ago), Central Bankers and economic gurus who have studied the 1970s-- the long, painful decade of stagflation-- prescribed a drastic remedy of slamming on the brakes of economic growth to contain inflation. Some nonetheless fear a long period of inflation and stagnant growth.

The 1970s taught that cheerleading, patience, and half-measures would not work. The Whip Inflation Now (WIN) campaign, price controls, and other approaches failed until the then-Federal Reserve chair, Paul Volker, boldly imposed draconian interest-rate increases that threw the economy into deep recession. Inflation tamed. Lesson learned. 

Certainly, no political regime wants to be associated with income-and-wealth-devouring inflation. But neither would it want to suffer through a job-devouring, wage-declining recession. Voters and subjects seek to punish the politicians in office when either situation arises. 

Thus, politicians and rulers are caught on the horns of a dilemma. If they ignore inflation, they pay a political price. If they attack inflation and bring on economic decline, they also incur the wrath of the electorate or their subjects. Either option taken constitutes a deep threat to the incumbent party or the ruling regime. 

Recently, some politicians have chosen to ignore the lesson that bourgeois economists have drawn from the 1970s bout with stagflation. Turkish president Erdogan decided to defy the convention by coercing the country’s central bank into lowering interest rates in the face of growing inflation, betting that the benefits of economic growth would outweigh any increase in inflation. He was wrong. Inflation has soared with devastating results on the people’s living standards and security.

Even more recently, the newly selected Conservative UK prime minister, Liz Truss, out of sheer arrogance or a profound economic ignorance, offered a budget based upon promoting growth (predictably through tax cuts for the rich!) and ignoring the anti-inflation moves of the Bank of England (BOE). Financial markets immediately reacted violently, forcing the BOE to go on a corrective bond-buying spree, and earning a rare rebuke of European government policy from the International Monetary Fund. Once again, the lesson of the 1970s stagnation crisis was harshly driven home.

With an interim election only weeks away, the ruling party in the US fears a severe beatdown from the angry electorate, devastated by sharp price increases imposed by profit-hungry monopoly corporations, declining incomes, and exploding interest payments on loans. At best, President Biden can only browbeat his Saudi allies for sustaining high energy prices in a global market disrupted by US corporate interests and US-instigated war, while the Federal Reserve slams on the economic brakes.

Liberal and social democratic labor leaders, party leaders, and pundits correctly object to the frequent blaming of inflation upon “greedy” workers or bloated union contracts. Even a cursory glance at the Bureau of Labor Statistics demonstrates that throughout this inflationary period income growth trailed and did not lead the growth in prices. That said, what do they think caused this persisting inflation? What can they offer in response to the bitter pill prescribed by bourgeois economists and the Central Banks?

Hell bent on saving capitalism from itself, some liberal and left thinkers like Dean Baker and Richard Wolff see price controls, ration cards, or public commissions as possible approaches (I refute these solutions here). Even if these fixes were likely to be enforced by governments thoroughly captured by capitalism, it would be unlikely that they could even be adopted in today’s volatile political atmosphere. The impending severe crisis cannot be met by wishful bromides or failed tactics.

More seriously, some on the left point to “financialization” as the cause of capitalism’s ills today. While the much-abused term begs many questions, it does describe one side of the restructuring of roles assumed by the leading capitalist countries as a response to the previous, 1970s version of stagflation. That is, so-called “financialization” was the new role of some advanced capitalist countries that deindustrialized after the stagflation of the 1970s. The flight of industry to low-wage countries was part of the answer to 1970s stagflation, stabilizing global capitalism and restoring the rate of profit for most of the next two decades. 

“Financialization” was the accompanying new role for those capitalist countries that surrendered their industries to emergent low-wage countries.

The stagflation of the 1970s caused the demise of the Keynesian consensus that had come to dominate economic policy since the Great Depression. That toolbox contained nothing to fix what was over a decade of roaring inflation. Indeed, many orthodox economists blamed the Keynesian tools for creating the conditions that led to that round of stagflation. In any event, it was the “financialization” era that superseded 1970s stagflation and was then believed to restore capitalist accumulation after its assault by stagflation. Therefore, it’s difficult to envision “financialization” as both a solution and cause of stagflation. 

While it is fashionable, since the crisis of 2007-2009, to see the dramatic rise of financial engineering and activity-- centered on the development of the many new financial instruments-- as the sand in the gears of capitalism, there is no reason to believe that it is any more than another adaptive stage in a resilient, but constantly crisis-plagued socio-economic system. 

It is difficult to foresee an easy, relatively painless capitalist solution to stagflation. That is not to discount the durability of capitalism. But the history of the 1970s teaches that any answer comes with enormous pain. We are only beginning to experience the rising costs from interest payments on top of the rising consumer prices. We are only beginning to feel the effects of galloping inflation compounded by stagnant incomes and growing unemployment. We are only beginning to recognize the strain on retirement funds and 401k’s. The lessons of the 1970s are distant and poorly remembered. But they are there for those who wish to heed them.

It should not be lost to anyone studying those lessons that hourly wages in the US adjusted for inflation have remained stagnant since the 1970s. More families now have two or more earners to compensate. Household debt has risen to counteract the loss in earning power. And income and wealth inequality has exploded, topping any other historic period. 

With a lost decade to stagflation and forty subsequent years of a tepid, crisis-ridden “recovery,” it is hard to imagine how people can endure another round of stagflation. It is hard to imagine how people can fail to explore the alternative to the capitalist system that brings so much unnecessary pain and misery.

Of course, part of the reason for ideological stagnation lies with the political parties, institutions, and misleaders that are so deeply invested in seeing capitalism persist. There would be no “social justice” industry-- the tens of thousands of foundations, NGOs, and charities-- without capitalism. Their criticism of capitalism ends, when the subject of socialism arises. Similarly, educators, writers, and media figures cannot risk alienating those who guarantee their stature and incomes. It goes without saying that both major US political parties are entirely invested in capitalism.

Yet their cynicism and hypocrisy would evaporate if it weren’t for the enormous material resources that capitalism makes available to those who safeguard the system's future. That will not change until the masses of the people use the power of their numbers to change it.

Whatever joy we may derive from the ruling class’s fears and anxiety over the current crisis is overshadowed by the hardships yet to disrupt the lives of millions of working people. 

Socialism is the alternative.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

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

Afghanistan Follies

The end of the 20-year US Afghanistan adventure is another one of imperialism’s overreaching, supremely arrogant, regime-change projects ending in fiasco. 

For most of the post-war era, the US and Israel-- the anointed police agent of the Eastern Mediterranean and Central Asia-- promoted Islamism as a bulwark against secularists and socialists. Both governments offered arms and aid, while enthusiastically tolerating cultural and political backwardness in the service of imperialist interests. From Nasser to Assad, the US counter posed Islamist “freedom fighters,” with their feudal values and intolerance, against imperfect, but secular, anti-monarchical, independent, and nationalist regimes.

Should it come as a surprise that those same “freedom fighters” eventually turned on their secular, infidel sponsors? 

Twenty years ago, former clients of the US mounted suicide attacks on symbols of US power. The same Islamic warriors under the direction of a prominent Saudi, Osama Bin Laden, who were armed and encouraged to attack Soviet troops supporting a secular, progressive government in Afghanistan, turned on their US masters. 

The US military responded with an occupation of Taliban-governed Afghanistan, said to be the protector of Bin Laden's jihadists. With the hubris displayed by previous empire builders, US authorities set out to shape Afghanistan into a reliable junior partner, a society to be built around the same inequalities and elite dominance found in the US. In twenty years, the US occupiers succeeded in fostering unimaginable corruption, in installing cynical leaders completely detached from the Afghan people, in introducing a swarm of NGOs parasitically feeding on Western funding, and in finally restoring Afghan acceptance of the Taliban.

As a 300,000-soldier army equipped with sophisticated US weaponry, US training, and a modern air force dissolved before motley warriors with twentieth-century assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, twenty years of myths melted away. Pundits, bureaucrats, generals, and politicians scrambled to attach blame to someone else. Fingers were pointing in every direction. What was a systemic failure, a collective misadventure underwent a tortured reconstruction as Biden’s failure or Trump’s failure, two answers that required little thought and even less analysis.

In fact, Biden’s withdrawal of US troops may prove to be the crowning achievement of his administration.

Three other Presidents lacked the courage and integrity to call a halt to the occupation and war (those in the know-- including Obama-- acknowledge that Biden was the only one in the Obama administration who opposed the troop surge and continuing the war).

Because the media moguls have glorified the generals, the “special” forces, the cops, and the spies with primetime TV and big screen movies, they elude blame in the Afghanistan fiasco. Yet it was a military operation from start to finish. Anything that the four Presidents uttered since 2001 came to them from military or security sources: status assessments, the balance of forces, troop readiness, etc. were all the products of military minds. Of course, that doesn’t stop the discredited General Petraeus from braying his disdain for the “political” failure to secure the Afghanistan exit.

The popular “Saigon” comparison with the retreat from Kabul is surely apt, but where is the comparison with the Soviet exit from Afghanistan? For those who like to gloat about Afghanistan being the USSR’s Vietnam, the analogy between the respective exits is embarrassing to the imperialists. 

When the Soviets left Afghanistan in February of 1989, US intelligence expected the government-- arrayed against a mujahideen supported by generous assistance from the US, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Germany, and the PRC-- to fall within three to six months. Instead, the leftist government held the Islamists at bay until 1992. 

Defense of Jalalabad in 1989 and Paghman in 1990 and disunity among the mujahideen factions proved that the secular, progressive government retained support for its land reforms, secular schools, rights of women, etc. Ultimately, the reactionary Russian government of Boris Yeltsin refusing even basic assistance, disunity within the progressive Afghan government, and the sheer weight of the foreign-backed assault forced the fall of the government.

Those today bemoaning the expected Taliban retreat on women’s rights, they need to revisit Stephen Gowans’s scathing article from ten years ago, Women’s Rights in Afghanistan. Gowans sarcastically opines concerning women’s rights: “Anyone worried about the revival of the Taliban ought to be hoping for the revival of the communists.”

This saga of foreign intervention-- designed to bleed the Soviet Union-- seldom if ever finds its way into Western media accounts. The consequent bloody war between the mujahideen factions never gets laid at the interventionists’ doorsteps, a war that in one form or another continues to this day.

But no one in Western media circles dares to revisit the doomed effort by the Afghan people to bring their country into the modern era. In fact, Western elites mocked and undermined the effort. Today, the joint effort by the Afghan Peoples’ Democratic Party and the USSR to unite and advance the country is a denied history. Pundits are afraid to compare that project with the twenty-year US failure, the evaporation of a puppet army, and the bum-rush exit. 

It is a bitter irony that Biden and others-- disappointed with and disparaging the performance of the Afghan military-- now blame the Afghans for their lack of will; they can’t be forced to fight for their “freedom and democracy.” Why US authorities didn’t anticipate this twenty years ago is beyond comprehension.

The very idea of forcing a country to do something deemed by another country to be in its better interests is an absurdity, an absurdity that insults the basic concept of self-determination.

Where will US policy makers next force their unwanted will on another independent country?

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Sacrificed at the Altar of Democratic Party Fealty

The COVID pandemic called into question many of the deeply held, foundational beliefs of twenty-first century capitalism. “Universal truths” like the efficacy of just-in-time production, the sanctity of fiscal restraint, the necessity of balanced budgets, and the sin of direct cash handouts were either shattered or unceremoniously discarded. For those able to think beyond the reformist box, the global pandemic challenged the very legitimacy of capitalism.

But perhaps the greatest myth-busting consequence of COVID was the mirror it held up to the US healthcare system or, more accurately, the US health consumer/insurance industry. 

Of course, most US citizens have long expressed a preference, when properly asked, for a universal system shorn of private insurance, like the original Medicare or a publicly financed, executed, and administered system like the Veterans Administration healthcare system.

It is no secret that, despite widespread support, the US public has been denied its choice by politicians shamefully influenced by the campaign contributions, the intense lobbying, and out-and-out graft of profit and “non-profit” networks, insurance and drug companies, and the political heft of others parasitic on a profit-driven system. While the public surely deserves better, it is mired in a system of increasing complexity, blind, confusing choices, and unfettered cost increases. 

The hucksters of private initiative, competition, and choice never explain that profit-seeking always produces and reproduces deception, consumer uncertainty, and unequal outcomes. They have argued persistently against reform because it would reduce the choices available to the “consumer.” This free-market hocus-pocus remains the default argument of the healthcare industry. But they curiously abandon their commitment to real choice when it comes to the Medicare-for-All option. That choice is foreclosed.

So, when the COVID virus struck the US, the ensuing rapid spread of cases, the shortage of hospital facilities, staff, and equipment, and the obscene rise in deaths exposed the lack of a comprehensive, universal, people-first public health system. States scrambled to find individual solutions to common problems; political calculations overrode human suffering; finger-pointing abounded; and states, municipalities, and systems hoarded scarce resources. Waves of new infections overwhelmed the patchwork, disorganized, and incoherent free-market approach.

Thus, a great opportunity was presented by the catastrophic COVID response of the richest country in the world, an opportunity to popularize the advantages of alternatives to an unpopular, failed system clung to by corrupted politicians and profiteers. 

Indeed, many in the single-payer, Medicare-for-All movement seized this tragic, but instructive moment. Many wrote, spoke, and organized around the devastating failure of private, competitive, profit-driven healthcare options. If anything good could come out of an embarrassing systemic failure, they argued, it would be that it underscored the need to move to a national system of universal and comprehensive healthcare delivered equally to all.

But political opportunism infected far too many who saw a chance to link the COVID catastrophe solely to Donald Trump, rather than lay it at the doorstep of a failed system. Of course, it is possible to heap some blame, a lot of blame on Donald Trump while indicting the system as well. Unfortunately, the crushing imperatives of the two-party system and the emotionally unhinged determination to eliminate Trump at all costs came at a price: the systemic failure of the existing, profit-before-people model and its needed replacement were pushed to the neverland of empty promises. The failure to combat COVID was firmly attached to Donald Trump. 

Blind loyalty to the Democratic Party has overshadowed any commitment to principle. Similarly, the fetish of personality, of form over content, has disabled the advancement of issues. Insofar as Trump was a creep, it was more important to heap blame on him for any and every failure of the system. The movement for single-payer was one of many casualties of this everything-and-everybody up against Trump. 

It is a lazy opportunism to attribute long-standing policy failures, like that of the Rube Goldberg US healthcare system, solely to an unhinged blowhard like Donald Trump. A conventional Democrat (like Andrew Cuomo) would (and did!) fare little better within the disastrous US model. 

Thus, any momentum gained by the COVID catastrophe’s discrediting of the US health-service industry is lost to the exigencies of the Democratic Party. We’ve gotten rid of Trump, but we’re stuck with a President who has declared that there will be no change to a universal system on his watch.

Meanwhile, capitalism’s champions are tirelessly carrying forward the fight to defend the for-profit system. Niall Ferguson, the popular conservative public intellectual known for his staunch defense of the British Empire, has written an essay published in The Wall Street Journal, arguing that had only the politicians taken the same tact as their counterparts did with the 1957 “Asian” flu, the US would have had far better outcomes (Ferguson is famous or infamous for his counterfactual histories).

Buried among a barrage of seemingly disconnected data and slippery comparisons is his thesis: “In 1957, the U.S. rose to the challenge of the ‘Asian flu’ with stoicism and a high tolerance for risk, offering a stark contrast with our approach to Covid-19.” 

Ferguson’s recipe of benign neglect (“Eisenhower did not declare a state emergency. There were no state lockdowns and… school closures.”) stands in stark contrast to his detailed touting of the speedy, efficient development of a vaccine in 1957. He feels no logical discomfort in hailing personal risk-taking and institutional diffidence while, at the same time, praising the government’s speedy, effective vaccine development as significant for success in 1957!

We learn that the hospital-beds-per-thousand-people ratio was at an all-time high (9.18 per 1000) in 1957, over three times greater than in 2020. Ferguson also credits this far-greater capacity decisively to the ‘success’ of 1957. Yet he surely knows that it was his beloved Thatcher (and Reagan) who fueled the market fundamentalism behind the shrinkage of available hospital beds in the interest of capitalist ‘efficiency’ and profit. 

Bathed in nostalgia for the fifties (Elvis, teenage boomer affluence, the Beat generation), Ferguson constructs an idealized world of minimal government, stolid Republican leadership, Cold War smugness, and ethnic hierarchies fearlessly confronting a pandemic and offering an alternative (counterfactually) to our own COVID experience.

If Ferguson’s fantastic, idealized model for confronting a deadly pandemic is the best that the left has to fear, then it has little to fear from his conservative ideological corner.

But the opportunism of the center-left is a huge barrier to securing a rational, universal healthcare system. Indeed, crass calculation infects the behavior of the ‘practical’ left on all issues. By answering every call of the Democratic establishment to put aside a burning issue in order to secure the victory of a ‘winning’ candidate, they guarantee that the burning issue becomes a forgotten issue.

Understandably, mass sentiment may run counter to majority interests, given that the masses are constantly bombarded with fast-food news and conformist commentary on media networks. But there is nothing understandable about liberals and ersatz socialists who willingly defer pressing vital initiatives to the service of a soulless Democratic Party. 

With Trump, it was the politics of tone that captured the attention of the center-left and drew its scorn. Beneath his outrageousness and his dismissive violation of political etiquette, there was little more than another pamper-the-rich tax scheme and bilious rhetoric. The ship of state continued on course, serving the rich and powerful, overfeeding the military-industrial complex, and terrorizing any country that defies US dominance. 

And now with Biden, the ship continues with a new pilot, but essentially on the same course. Certainly, there are adjustments, less bluster, less vulgarity. But that only boosts the politics of tone.

Yes, Biden has projected some ambitious, useful, and large-scale initiatives, but with the condition that he must achieve agreement from some of his Republican counterparts. The belief in such a rapprochement is either naive or a calculated ruse. As fear of inflation mounts, the retreat from ambitious action will accelerate. Biden is the new Obama, not the new FDR.

Allowing the Democratic Party to hold good, power-shifting, life-changing initiatives hostage to electoral success is a strategy that has not and will not work for the good of the people. 

History teaches many lessons; we can’t afford to continue to ignore them.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

 

Is the New Normal the Old Normal?

One month after President Biden’s inauguration, a crushing sense of déjà vu is settling in, an unsettling feeling that we have seen this all before. 

Key campaign issues that Biden stood by are now diluted, postponed, or simply neglected. The fate of once urgent issues like the minimum wage, student loan debt, immigrant rights, health care reform, etc. now seem less pressing, more subject to study, deliberation, bipartisanship, or revision. 

Democratic Party politicians are taking their priorities from the headlines: squeezing the last bit of Trump-distraction from a trial with no prospect of victory and scrutinizing a silly stock market prank billed as a rebellion against the rich and powerful.

Without Trump, the media is returning to the old, trusted practices of celebrity fetish and ‘gotcha’ politics-- Lady GaGa’s stolen dogs. 

Meanwhile, intense Democratic Party fundraising shamelessly continues with the last election barely settled.

While the Trump administration policies remain largely intact, there seems to be less outrage boiling. Things take time, we are told (except for bombing, killing, and maiming in Syria). The patronizing rebuke of impatience issues from Biden supporters. 

Where have we seen this before?

Recall the euphoria that sprung forth a little over twelve years ago with the defeat of John McCain and the election of Barack Obama. Liberals and the soft-headed left took the event as singular. One lefty famously wrote in a fit of gross exaggeration:

"...hundreds of millions-Black, Latino, Asian, Native-American and white, men and women, young and old, literally danced in the streets and wept with joy, celebrating an achievement of a dramatic milestone in a 400-year struggle, and anticipating a new period of hope and possibility."

In this space, I responded incredulously: “Hundreds of millions? Literally? A dramatic milestone? Of course, there were not hundreds of millions even voting, nearly half of which voted against Obama! And ‘dramatic milestones’ should be reserved for truly world shaking events like the Civil War, The Great Depression, and possibly the economic catastrophe now looming. This dramatic overstatement is precisely the kind of puffery that contributes to isolating the left from working people.”

But this unhinged faith in “a new period of hope and possibility” was not uncommon, though seldom so wildly exuberant. Zealotry for Obama ranged across the Democratic Party, infecting the “progressive” left even more deeply.

A month before Obama’s inauguration, disenchantment began to set in, as his cabinet and staff took shape and some policy positions became clear. 

I reminded readers of a statement once made by popular liberal columnist, Walter Lippmann, in response to a similar idolatry of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "Franklin D. Roosevelt is an amiable man with many philanthropic impulses, but he is not the dangerous enemy of anything. He is too eager to please.... Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege.” And what was attributed to him-- historically progressive and significant New Deal legislation-- was largely the result of pressure from mass movements of workers, farmers, the unemployed, African Americans (who got little), and small business people. 

And that proved to make all the difference. 

After the election, instead of holding Obama to the meager “progressive” agenda on which he campaigned and demanding even more, “the leadership of the broad left - much of the peace movement, liberals, environmental social justice activists, etc. - surrendered their critical judgment, independence, and influence to a blind trust in a fictitious movement for change. In the history of social change in the US, every real advance was spurred by independent organization and struggle unhampered by the niceties of bourgeois politics. From the Abolitionist movement to the Civil Rights movement, from the Populist movement to the Great Society, from the Anti-imperialist League to the Anti-Vietnam War movement, the initiative for change sprung from committed, independent activists who defied the caution and inertia of elected officials.”

Even with a supermajority in the Senate and a majority in the House, Obama showed the “caution and inertia of elected officials.” And the euphoric left went to sleep, the antiwar movement waned, and labor leaders delighted in their access to White House social events. The fiction that social change can come from dangling the carrot of support and trust in front of Democratic Party elected officials failed the left once again. 

After two years, and the loss of the Senate supermajority and the House majority, Obama’s administration lost the initiative with little accomplished. 

Writing in December of 2010, I recalled an article that I posted in the fall of 2008 suggesting that Obama’s presidency might “reprise” the disappointing Carter term. I then asked the pertinent question: “The promise of 1976 was squandered by the Carter Administration. Will the opportunities for change afforded by Republican failure be wasted again in 2008?”

With the honeymoon over, the truth about the Obama administration became clear, and is even more clear today, that the answer is a resounding “yes!” -- another lost opportunity.

Will the opportunities afforded by the defeat of the odious Trump administration be wasted also? Will the Biden administration turn liberals and those tied umbilically to the Democrats against advocating for any real change? Will the “responsible, practical” left entrust change to a Party with a history of betrayal? Will Biden follow Obama, Clinton, and Carter-- 20 of the last 46 years of presidential administrations-- down the rat hole of unfulfilled promises?

Today, with the left shackled to foundation grants, NGOs, and think tanks, as well as lacking the will to escape the gravity of the Democratic Party, the prospect of a truly independent political movement grows dimmer.

Yet the need for independence has never been greater!

As the crises of US capitalism mount, the argument for moderation and compromise becomes the argument for surrender. If it seems daunting to build a militant, independent left, surely it is even more frustrating to invest time and energy into an immovable instrument of capital, an institution that has shown, for most of our lifetimes, to be capable of only serving the interests of ruling elites, unless prodded by a determined, independent, militant movement.

Trump is gone, but Trumpism will return, if we fail to overcome the inertia of a lifetime of Democratic Party betrayal of meaningful reform.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

It’s Now Biden’s Cold War

 

Biden’s first week or so in office proved eventful. He began to aggressively undo much of what Trump undid of the Obama Presidency. In essence, he is returning US politics to 2016. For those who longed only for the exit of Trump and a return to what they saw as the comforting past, the Biden victory is cause for celebration.

For those who want an answer to a raging pandemic that has taken more US lives than World War II, for those who fear for the future of the millions newly unemployed by the pandemic, for those millions in arrears on their rent and eventually facing eviction, and for the nearly three million households forced into forbearance on their mortgage payments, there is little yet to celebrate.

Despite the formal changing of the guard, the distance between the haves and have-nots in the US continues to grow. And more and more working people are impressed into the army of the have-nots. The catastrophic pandemic year has further brought mass insecurity and fear, prompting a strong pullback in consumer spending over the last three months.

It is doubtful that 2016 answers will solve 2021 problems. 

Biden’s Obama redo is not absolute, however. There are elements-- arguably, some of the worst elements-- of Trump’s policies that the new administration plans to keep. For example, Biden will continue, even intensify Trump’s xenophobic “Buy American” campaign. 

Biden shows no stomach for undoing Trump’s encouragement of Israeli apartheid and aggression.  

In addition, the Biden team seems inclined to continue Trump’s war-by-sanctions emphasis. Where Obama waged war by surrogates and drones, Trump, and apparently now Biden, enforced US policy through-- equally destructive, but seemingly less depraved-- economic and political sanctions. Biden has not indicated that he will remove or loosen the noose that the US maintains around the economies of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, Cuba, or other states defying our leaders.

To his credit, Biden has shown a desire to extend the important START treaty with Russia, a treaty limiting nuclear weapons. This is a big deal.

At the same time, Biden has shown a frightening escalation of belligerency against the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC). Hostility toward the PRC took a leap in the Obama administration with his euphemistically named “Pivot to Asia,” which redirected military attention to the PRC.

In his inimitable fashion, Trump further stoked this hostility, following up with massive tariffs and punitive sanctions. With a subservient media, popular approval of the PRC sank dramatically.

Now, Biden has promised to get tougher on the PRC, an ominous and dangerous threat against the world’s second or third greatest military power.

It takes only a glance at recent history and at the relevant economic data to understand the source of the hysterical reaction to the PRC on the part of the US ruling class. The economic collapse of 2007-2009 nearly brought down the US and European economies, while the PRC barely faltered; quick stimulative action restored a vibrant Chinese economy. In fact, it could be argued that the Chinese ‘bounce’ was a necessary, if not sufficient condition of the global recovery.

A little over a decade later, with a raging worldwide pandemic, the global economy is again in a deep funk, with the PRC economy showing resilience and growth. In both cases and in the interim period, the Chinese economy has made remarkable gains against its Western rivals (PRC consumer spending has grown by 171.2% since 2010, compared to 35.2% growth in the US).

Since 2016, the PRC share of global GDP has risen from 14.2% to 16.8%, while the US share has dropped slightly to 22.2%. And in the pandemic year, Chinese GDP grew by 2.3% against a global economic performance estimated to drop by 4.3% and a US GDP sliding by 3.6%. As the PRC economy gains, one can understand the frustration in US ruling circles as they witness a rival growing in strength and global influence.

Despite the aggressive tariff policy of the Trump administration, Chinese exports (and imports) expanded dramatically in late 2020. Exports grew by 21.1% in November and 18.1% in December over the prior year, assuring the PRC an even bigger slice of global trade.

But, perhaps, the most alarming statistic for US policy makers reveals that the PRC has, for the first time, passed the US in new foreign direct investment. While the US has accumulated far more foreign direct investment, the new data show that investors now look at the PRC as a better haven for profit taking than the US. This surely sends a shock wave through the US capitalist class. 

It is not alleged Chinese human rights violations, Chinese income inequality, Chinese belligerency or aggressiveness that drives US hostility, but the PRC’s challenge to US economic and political hegemony. With global economies so intertwined and with a growing dependence on Chinese supplies and Chinese domestic demand, foreign obeisance to US capitalism is threatened. The US cannot so easily dictate the foreign policy of others nor force open the doors for US capitalism. Put simply, the PRC presents a growing challenge to US imperialism.

History shows that rivalries and challenges to imperialist powers create the conditions for war; all of the great wars of the era of monopoly capitalism began as wars over markets, resources, capital expansion, and capital penetration. From the wars of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, through two world wars and wars of national liberation, to NATO’s encirclement of Russia and the US “Pivot to Asia,” all major wars and warlike confrontations are imperialist wars. 

The fact that both US political parties concur on policy toward the PRC (and Russia) only underscores the degree of danger posed by US aggressiveness. The consensus extends to the media which failed to force even a minimal discussion of policy toward the PRC into the Presidential debates or their election coverage. 

Sadly, with the election of Biden, much of the left and the New York Times-addicted liberal set may return to their slumbers as they did during the Obama administration, entrusting foreign policy to their elected leaders. 

This will be a tragic mistake.

We desperately need a mass anti-war movement-- vigilant and independent-- to stave off the dangerous machinations of US imperialism and its death-dealing war machine.  

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com